Did You Hear About the Latest Gay Thing?
Obama signed a memorandum Wednesday giving (some) benefits to the SOs of gay Federal workers.
It looks like it's a chess move at this point. Very little was said about his promises to the gay community beyond some words at his inauguration speech. On June 1st, he signed an order making June GLBT Pride month (something which has sort of been done before by Clinton), but its language had softened since Obama had pledged to repeal othe Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell.
For those who were paying attention (I sure wasn't), those issues fell off the official White House agenda just the day before: May 31st. Then this announcement comes that doesn't seem like it's going to deliver half of what was promised during the campaign.
To add fuel to the fire, the Justice Department released a memo recently that compared gay relationships to incest in an attempt to defend existing laws. It wasn't a Republican or Religious Right mouthpiece, oh no: this was Obama's Justice Department.
So this memorandum comes out, feeling very much like a bandage to a series of wounds inflicted over the last few weeks.
What do you think? Purely reflexive, or the first step in something more?
~Sean
It looks like it's a chess move at this point. Very little was said about his promises to the gay community beyond some words at his inauguration speech. On June 1st, he signed an order making June GLBT Pride month (something which has sort of been done before by Clinton), but its language had softened since Obama had pledged to repeal othe Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell.
For those who were paying attention (I sure wasn't), those issues fell off the official White House agenda just the day before: May 31st. Then this announcement comes that doesn't seem like it's going to deliver half of what was promised during the campaign.
To add fuel to the fire, the Justice Department released a memo recently that compared gay relationships to incest in an attempt to defend existing laws. It wasn't a Republican or Religious Right mouthpiece, oh no: this was Obama's Justice Department.
So this memorandum comes out, feeling very much like a bandage to a series of wounds inflicted over the last few weeks.
What do you think? Purely reflexive, or the first step in something more?
~Sean