Thursday, March 27, 2008
Obama's Open Letter to LGBT America
This is really amazing. To think that in my lifetime a Presidential candidate would so openly and honestly address LGBT issues like this.
Here is Obama's Open Letter to LGBT America in its entirety:
I’m running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all – a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.
Equality is a moral imperative. That’s why throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against LGBT Americans. In Illinois, I co-sponsored a fully inclusive bill that prohibited discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity, extending protection to the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. In the U.S. Senate, I have co-sponsored bills that would equalize tax treatment for same-sex couples and provide benefits to domestic partners of federal employees. And as president, I will place the weight of my administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes and a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment. But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage. Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate. While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether. Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does. I have also called for us to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.
The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When it comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science. While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use common sense. We should have age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception. We should pass the JUSTICE Act to combat infection within our prison population. And we should lift the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. In addition, local governments can protect public health by distributing contraceptives.
We also need a president who’s willing to confront the stigma – too often tied to homophobia – that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. I confronted this stigma directly in a speech to evangelicals at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, and will continue to speak out as president.
That is where I stand on the major issues of the day. But having the right positions on the issues is only half the battle. The other half is to win broad support for those positions. And winning broad support will require stepping outside our comfort zone. If we want to repeal DOMA, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and implement fully inclusive laws outlawing hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, we need to bring the message of LGBT equality to skeptical audiences as well as friendly ones – and that’s what I’ve done throughout my career. I brought this message of inclusiveness to all of America in my keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign – from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached.
Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans. But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary.
Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Editor of New Republic Defends Obama
This is absolutely huge and one of the most honest and forthright articles I've read in a long time. The Editor in Chief of the conservative New Republic just penned the following article, which I copied in full below. Truly amazing.
The power of the preacher is an unmeasured force in American life. Of course, now that it has become an issue in a political campaign, we are focusing on the one minister and the one candidate whose lives at church have been intertwined both in fact and in the public eye. The two men are each charismatic in their own ways, different ways, as anyone who has seen them speak (if even just on television or on syncopated and, thus, distorted YouTube clips) can attest.
Barack Obama speaks in a professorial manner in which the logic of his argument, calmly laid out, is the drama of the oration. I have my own analogy. Of course, I never heard Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. speak. But I read into his addresses and opinions the moral and legal ganglion of more than seven decades of our national history, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. And I hear in Obama's cadence not only what makes him attractive to audiences but also something very much like Holmes's disciplined thinking, and it is this that makes this presidential aspirant truly eloquent. In only a decade in public life, he has become the (oh yes, gangling) ganglion of our hopes for a post-racial country. It is ironic--isn't it?--that we should have come so quickly to the dawn of post-racialism while still lumbering clumsily through the miasma of a misnamed multi-culturalism.
We are all linked to the places from which we came, though some of us have moved very far from them. My relationship to the different rabbis whose sermons I have not just heard, but heard intently over more than 50 years, would make a very difficult narrative--not quite as difficult as a narrative about my father and me, but up there. I now attend a synagogue in New York with my children and my grandson. I love the synagogue; I do not love the rabbis for I do not really know them personally. More to the point, I do not love their sermons. Two years ago, Yom Kippur, the rabbi parsed a banal speech by Bella Abzug, the old and (if truth be told) faithful red mama, as if it were a sacred text. Feh. One of this congregation's ingenuous innovations to the routine confessional of sins ("We lie. We cheat ...") in the prayer book is the following: "We rush towards war and crawl to peace." This is a lie! Why do I still pray with this assembly? Because, aside from the offending "hip" politics of the rabbis, there is an all-embracing warmth that suffuses the fold. There is beautiful music. The service is almost all in Hebrew. Still, my then-not-quite-four year-old grandson said to me on the way out, "I have never felt closer to God." Dayenu, as we say on Passover: "It is sufficient." Or, as one of the songs of the tradition known to almost every Jew puts it, Hinay ma tov ... : "How good it is for brothers to sit together ...".
OK, Barack Obama's predicament is more complicated than mine. Remember he titled one of his books Dreams From My Father. I suspect that most of Obama's operative dreams came from his mother. After all, his father deserted him, the common nightmare of African American youth. (Increasingly also white youth.) That is a thread that connects Obama to his own generation of African Americans and to the next. His father did not inspire him to work hard at school or to become the editor of the Harvard Law Review. The supportive and yearning parent was his mother and, by extension, his maternal grandparents. They are his dreams, and his father is the absent yearning.
Obama's life was at once over-determined and under-determined. There are so many boxes he could have checked, and it is not altogether unsurprising that the one he checked most firmly was his father's box. I more than suspect that Pastor Jeremiah Wright is, in Obama's life, also his father's vagrant presence. No one should arrogate to himself counseling anybody to sever ties, even fragile ones, perhaps fragile ones especially, to one's father. Of course, it makes a difference that Obama's father was not an American but a Kenyan, not of a Christian background but a Muslim one. But the psychology of connection and separation is not an easy puzzle, and it does not fit a predictable pattern. Nonetheless, suffice it to say that it exists.
The fact is that many of us were astonished by the rhythm of the English language as it is practiced in Wright's church. Forget for the moment the content. Take a look at a service in what is now Otis Moss's church. This is a Christianity that seems to outsiders to have as much to do with break dancing as it does with the New Testament, and the culture of this one church is very much like the culture of thousands all over America. You may puzzle as to how Barack Obama, of the quiet demeanor and the Holmesian logic, can relate to this pattern of religiosity. But, if I may jog your oversensitized memory, there was more of Chicago's Trinity United Church in Martin Luther King's perorations than there was Reinhold Niebuhr. The typical black church service is not a Unitarian prayer meeting or Catholic devotions. It is something "other" that many of us have not experienced and do not know. It is not ours but theirs. And what's wrong with that?
You object: You were not caught out by Wright's rhythm or his vestments, by the congregation's hallelujahs or its songs of praise and prayer. What bothered you was his, their words. Mostly his, that is, Pastor Wright's words. You were concerned by the content. And so, at least in part, was I. Wright's content is not intellectually nuanced, and his words are in large measure crude. His content is often foul.
Of course, while one can assume that there is something in the style of Trinity's Christianity that attracts Obama, no one has even suggested that Obama agrees with any of Wright's controversial words. In fact, one knows from the senator's own words past and present that his love of country is unsurpassed--and unsurpassed in a way that will attract younger people who had lapsed into an unthinking and unrealistic internationalism.
Leaving a church is never a simple transaction. Episcopalians in America (and Anglicans elsewhere) have had all kinds of provocations. A gay bishop in New Hampshire has virtually split the communion. Some are secessionists because of Gene Robinson's elevation. Some want to stay and fight it. Others want to put the oppositionists to the fire. Some on the outs want to put themselves under the discipline of a religiously conservative African diocese. Mostly, they stay and grumble, one way or another. A similar process is underway in England, where suddenly the archbishop of Canterbury wants British Muslims to be permitted to live under Sharia law and forgo the liberties of British law. A church with leaders like that is bound to have troubles. But the church, big and small, national and local, will remain.
While pondering Obama's tribulations about his pastor, I also reflected about the far more laden crisis for Roman Catholic politicians who are for a woman's legal right to an abortion. Every so often, church authorities threaten to excommunicate them--a drastic act by a bishop or archbishop in his diocese. But it goes higher than that. On his trip to Latin America last year, for example, Pope Benedict approved a statement pronouncing that "legislative action in favor of abortion is incompatible with participation in the Eucharist," and politicians who vote that way should "exclude themselves from communion." In 2004, Sean O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston, said pro-choice politicians like John Kerry "shouldn't dare come to Communion." In any case, the position of the church is that such politicians have already excommunicated themselves. This is a far more urgent situation than the one in which Obama finds himself.
Frankly, I am relieved that the Wright convulsion has not focused on Israel and the Jews. This is not, then, what some non-Jews might think of as a "narrow" matter. But the truth is that Obama has a much clearer grasp of what the Jewish state faces than the common-place statements of support from other "pro-Israel" politicians, an erroneous view that almost ineluctably, in Obama's words, "sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." I trust Obama on this. I already know what strategic concessions Hillary's husband was ready to coerce Israel into giving to Yasir Arafat, who was dumb enough not to take them.
But there is a new game in town, and it is finding men and women for Obama to repudiate. I know about political campaigns and how they attract both fossils and novices. A new candidate lures more of both than a veteran. Indeed, if you look at Mrs. Clinton's campaign, you'll find that there are almost no fresh faces--and, thus, no fresh minds--in the coterie; and it is a coterie. It is a closed and nasty circle which learned its bad habits from Bill. That's why they are making one mistake after another. The rule is: Never be gracious if you have the chance to be vicious. The non plus ultra of this style was the still greedy ex-president suggesting that, while his wife loved her country, Obama didn't love his.
The other malignant chores can be safely left by the Clintons for the journalistic right to perform. Both The Weekly Standard and Commentary will readily comply. Of course, the fantasy that Zbigniew Brzezinski would return to power or even influence is just that, a fantasy. Zbig is too nostalgic for the old Cold War with Russia for any president to allow him to come close to big power diplomacy. He once confided to me that Saddam Hussein would be to him "what Sadat was to Henry." Oh my. Obama might have thought him smart on Iraq (I do not) and brought him along to a speech on the subject in Iowa. But, frankly, Zbig disqualified himself from influence on the Middle East with all but poor Jimmy Carter, whom he persuaded that the Ayatollah Khomeini was a useful tool against the Soviets.
And on Monday, there emerged in The American Spectator the silly sayings of the hardly satanic figure of General Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak who has said (a) that Israel wants peace (something he's not sure about the Palestinians) and (b) that voters in Miami and New York determine American policy in the Arab world. With the latter statement, McPeak goes beyond even Walt and Mearshimer. It is odious. And I fervently hope that his advice is limited to matters of defense, if that. But if conservatives believe that the candidates are vulnerable to the invidious influence of their supporters on Israel policy, let them ponder the sway of James Baker over John McCain, the candidate whom the "fuck the Jews" secretary of state endorsed.
My point is not to impugn McCain. I trust him on Israel, admire him hugely and could even envision casting a vote for him. But every candidate has noxious supporters and it is simply illogical and unfair to impute the views of these supporters to their favored candidate, especially when the candidate clearly disagrees.
Another Superdelegate for Obama
From Ben Smith:
Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski, who represents Chicago's whitest and most conservative Democratic district, announces his support. Rahm Emanuel, who is uncommitted, is the only remaining member of the Illinois congressional delegation not backing Obama.
The Tide is Turning - Inspirational Obama Video by Bob Ceska
This video brought a bit of a tear to my eye. Bob Ceska sets up a mashup of Obama's Philadelphia speech on race juxtaposed with the horror of the last 7 years under George Bush and set to the tune of "The Tide is Turning" by Roger Waters, a song that was performed live in Berlin in 1989 to commemorate the end of the cold war. Really powerful stuff.
Humor: New Video Shows Clinton Under Fire in Bosnia
So sue me, but I just couldn't resist posting this YouTube video. I laughed out loud, especially at the shot of her shooting a terrorist. This is truly hilarious.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Mom and Sister at Obama Rally in Eugene, OR
I am sooo jealous of my darling mom and sister for being able to not only go to a huge Obama rally in my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, but also for being in the front row and shaking Obama's hand! I hope I'll get a similar opportunity someday!
Here's a photo -- my mom is in the dashing hat to Obama's right, my stepdad is directly behind her, and my sister is the one Senator Obama is reaching out to shake hands with:
Clinton Blames Sleep Deprivation for Her Bosnia Lie
So, I agree that now that the day is winding down, this meme could be getting a bit played out. I wasn't going to post on this until I found Hillary Clinton stepping in it in a worse way, in my opinion, than the original lie.
Here is this gem from Hillary Clinton's interview today with a Pennsylvania newspaper that offers up an even bigger, steamier lie:
On saying last week that she landed under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia in 1996, when she was first lady: "I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke."
This might be a good explanation if it weren't a cold, calculating, obvious lie on top of a lie.
After all, her comments about her harrowing entrée into Bosnia were in the printed text of her speech.
Not to mention the fact that she repeated exactly the same story on multiple occasions (see here for an example).
Remember, politicians all-too-often get caught up more in the misstatements about the original event than the event itself.
FACT: She said she was sleep deprived and therefore "misspoke".
FACT: Her comments prepared in advance of the event (and repeated at 3 other events) were written exactly as she said them.
As a result, she LIED.
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