Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was interviewed by Rachel Maddow yesterday on DADT and Obama's ability to repeal it. This video is worth your while to see, as it again points out that Obama could do away with that discriminatory and demeaning law if he wanted to but, despite his election promises to repeal it, he shows no desire to do so.
[Thanks to The Advocate.]
On the campaign trail Barack Obama pledged to reverse the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. During his first days in office, he reiterated his stance. Yet on Monday, with the legal backing of the Obama administration, the Supreme Court rejected a gay Ohio soldier's challenge to the law.
[For the full article, see here.]
James Pietrangelo II, the former Army infantryman and lawyer whose case the high court declined to review, reserved most of his ire for President Obama instead of the court. "He's a coward, a bigot and a pathological liar," Pietrangelo said in an interview with TIME shortly after the high court declined to hear his appeal. "This is a guy who spent more time picking out his dog, Bo, and playing with him on the White House lawn than he has working for equality for gay people," he added. "If there were millions of black people as second-class citizens, or millions of Jews or Irish, he would have acted immediately" upon taking office to begin working to lift "Don't ask, don't tell."
[For the full article, see here.]
What makes Obama's seeming hostility to rescinding DADT even more despicable is the following:
Obama also has some ammunition that Clinton never had: a new Gallup poll finds that most conservatives — 58% — now support openly gay people serving in uniform (nationally, 69% support the change; when Clinton assumed office, a Gallup poll found 53% of those polled opposed lifting the ban). Perhaps even more surprising, 58% of self-described Republicans, and 60% of weekly churchgoers, also support gay men and women serving openly in uniform. "While the Administration to date has not taken action on the issue," the polling firm reported last Friday, "the Gallup Poll data indicate that the public-opinion environment favors such a move."
[For the full article, see here.]
So, even with most of the American people in favor of removing DADT, and even most conservatives also in favor of removing that demeaning and likely illegal law, Obama still won't rescind it, showing him to be a two-faced odious politician who has played LGBT people and others who had hopes that he would live up to his lofty electioneering rhetoric as suckers.
2 comments:
Jerry,
I just had someone respond to my latest essay by claiming that words like "fag" and "queer" make LGBT Americans powerful. Look what kind of power we have: power that makes the President of the United States and the Supreme Court give us the finger. Oh, hell yeah! That's really damn powerful! And I'd be willing to bet that when Obama thinks of us, words like "fag" and "queer" do stick in his mind.
Hi Don Charles: Those who delight in calling themselves derogatory names are likely to be self-loathing (whether they are aware of it or not) and/or are not exactly intellectual heavyweights. They are living in a parallel universe, and that combination virtually guarantees that full and equal rights will be retarded for the foreseeable future. And they call that "activism?" As Frederick Schiller said, "Against stupidity even the gods contend in vain." Oh, he was right!!!!
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