“I Believe in Marriage Equality” – Barack Obama
Today was quite depressing to wake up, to find that yet another state had decided to embed hate in its constitution, but it wasn’t unexpected, North Carolina is hardly a place in which equality is valued.
There’s already a law on the books banning marriage equality, but now they’ve stripped the rights, recognition and protections of all North Carolinian families who are unmarried. Now its not all bad news, all the rumblings from within the Whitehouse about marriage equality, something wonderful happened.
Now you can be cynical all you like, but finally, later than he should Barack Obama has stood up for the equal rights of lesbian and gay americans.
Sadly of course he recently refused to sign an executive order protecting employment rights for millions of LGBT americans working for US government contractors. Its still a good step forward, hopefully the first of many more.
I’m sad that he didn’t do this a day earlier, in time for the NC vote. Thinking about that, however, I realised that he probably realised that the NC vote would have gone the way it did even if he had intervened, and that would have politically killed equal marriage as a thing that a president could support.
Perhaps the timing of this statement is likewise well considered. It’s well known that Obama, as things stand, is likely to win a second term. If Obama does so, having come out in favour of equal marriage, it strengthens the political case for equal marriage and LGB civil rights (not as much for the T, sadly), and weakens the GOP and Tea Party case against it – it proves that it’s not the ‘bring’s out the voters’ wedge issue that the GOP seems to think it is.