Causecast

by KAREN MURPHY, Contributing Writer

Where does President Obama really stand on gay marriage? Last year, caught up in the emotional euphoria of what looked like a New Era in American Politics and Social Policy that was spearheaded by blatant and outright love professed for the man at the forefront of this wave of feel-good hysteria — Barack Obama — we may have donned blinders too soon. Reading between the lines, we took his comments to mean something more than the words themselves.  Sure, he didn’t exactly come out in favor of same-sex marriage, but we knew that he couldn’t.  He wanted to but he couldn’t. Not if he wanted to get elected. At least, that’s what we told ourselves.

Now that the post-Inaugural hangovers have finally cleared and we’ve taken off the Blinders of Bush-Is-Gone Happiness, it’s time to get to work making some changes around here.

Obama’s Top Ten (er, Five) Ways to "Come Out" in Favor of Gay Marriage

1. Say what you mean and mean what you say. The civil rights page at Whitehouse.gov changed in April and was downgraded from a nice meaty full page with a long set of statements specifically mentioning a new era of support for the LGBT community, to this wimpy statement:

President Obama also continues to support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. He supports full civil unions and federal rights for LGBT couples and opposes a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.  He supports repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security, and also believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Change it back. We liked the other one better.

2. Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. It’s unconstitutional, and whatever you think about what marriage should be, denying full faith and credit to marriages deemed legal in a handful of states is harmful to the whole idea of state’s rights, which is a big part of how the nation was formed, at least according to my 12th grade Civics teacher, Mr. Emerson. In case anybody asks.

3. Make it clear: no constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Seriously. How does the definition of a certain type of intimate relationship have any place in our nation’s constitution?

4. Get Dick Cheney’s advice. (Dick Cheney???!) Yeah. He’s the guy who says, "Freedom means freedom for everyone." He wants that freedom legislated on a state-by-state basis, which sounds like a fight on our hands in, let’s see, just 44 more states. Uh, maybe this isn’t as good as it sounded at first.

5. Play nice. It’s a dance. People get all weird and emo about this stuff, so we need to show them there’s nothing scary about freedom for everyone and treating everyone equally. It won’t happen overnight, but this is one change we need to make. After all, don’t we want to be a world leader? (We are already following Canada, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and South Africa on this, but whatever. It would mean a lot around the world.)

Photo by marcn, flickr