For many, Obama is the messiah, brilliant awe inspiring a leader to all of us. Yes, I’m one of those rose tinted people but Andrew Sullivan’s
impassioned blog piece on gay rights underlines how important it is to look at things objectively. There is a sense that when Obama came in everyone could take a back seat as there was a leader in place, but remebering that his most-likened to figure, Kennedy would not have been the great liberal without a congress and beneath that the fierce demand for equality and social reform that boiled over in the 60s. Obama will be no different.
I lived through eight years of the Clintons and then eight years of Bush. Through it all, gay people were treated at the federal level like embarrassments or impediments. With Clinton, we were the means to raise money. With Bush, we were the means to leverage votes by exploiting bigotry. Obama seemed in the campaign to promise something else.
Naturally as he mentions Obama has had more on his plate than few Presidents have had to tackle, a global recession, two wards Climate Change but nevertheless when you read Sullivan’s articles on gay rights in America it brings home the importance of fighting for civil rights on a new front.
May 14th, 2009 at 08:52
I’m not sure in what sense Kennedy was a “great liberal”. He has very few achievements to his name, which obviously wasn’t entirely his fault given the timescale. But his presidency was in somewhat of a funk by ‘63, and, despite thumping Democratic majorities, the Congress he worked with wasn’t very liberal either owing to the Dixiecrats’ hold on power. Certainly nowhere near as liberal as the Dixiecrat-purged, DSG-dominated Congress on the early 1970s. You had to wait for LBJ’s legislative wrangling in ‘64 and the 89th Congress in ‘65 for anything much to happen.
Kennedy seems to be a cautious, Cold Warrior, whose hand was forced over things like Birmingham, but who wasn’t doing a great job of it because of the constraints of his time and his own ambivalence.
May 14th, 2009 at 15:40
Working out the old revision. Well, I meant in terms of his reputation
May 14th, 2009 at 15:42
That said, I take your point that he didn’t get that much done
June 22nd, 2009 at 03:42
‘Yes, I’m one of those rose tinted people…’
Oh God. Am I the only jaded 25-year old in the world? Mind, I was very moved when he won, and rather proud–I was also excruciatingly drunk, prancing about Finchley at 4-5 AM with my British friends. But I can’t understand the ‘Obama-Is-Messiah’ crowd. It’s a little…off-putting. :)
As for the gay rights issue, I don’t think it’s ever entirely fair to compare different social norms across time. And it’s entirely unfair, I think, comparing Clinton entering into office in 1993 to Obama’s in 2009. 16 years is indeed a very long time, and attitudes towards homosexuality in America have softened considerably in comparison–state constitutional amendments not withstanding.
What rankles many LGBTQ (however the acronym goes) activist friends of mine is the paltry/token mention of gay rights by Mr. Obama so far given that marked improvement over the past 2 decades.