There was a split response from the right to this weekend's events. One segment sympathized with upset gay activists or, at least, happily piled on the president. The other side, the Maggie Gallagher contingent, are unrepentant in seeing gay couples as the enemy. Glenn Reynolds:
My advice to the Gay Left is the same as my advice to the Tea Party
Right — if you don’t like what “your” politicians are doing, quit donating to ‘em and run somebody against them in the primary. They’ll notice. And the Gay Left and Tea Party Right might even want to talk to each other; they may find they’ve got more in common than they realize…
Except this isn't the "gay left". It's the gay right, left, and center as well. Have you noticed any gay Republicans opposing the repeal of DADT? Any gay people at all supporting the government's discrimination against its own citizens? But for too many boomers, if it's gay, it's left. For the next generation, that association doesn't hold any more. Maggie Gallagher:
Pity President Obama. He's done more, more quickly, for gay people than any president in history but it's clearly not enough. The leadership, the old heads, are trying to restrain and redirect their people. But gay Americans have imbibed the heady rhetoric of equality — not just any equality, they are the civil-rights movement of this century… The leveling wave of equality demands more, more, more, from government.
We want nothing from the government but to stop discriminating against us. We want to be left alone, as straight people are, allowed to serve our country without worrying, allowed to have legal security in our families as every straight person takes for granted. Why is that so hard to understand? Robert Stacy McCain:
If gay people vote Republican, they might not get the bullet-point agenda items demanded by HRC, but they will at least not have to accept the kind of two-faced, backhanded insults they get from Democrats who claim to be their "friends."
No, we'll get federal amendments to make us second class for ever, and state amendments designed to strip us of dignity and security. And vicious homophobic rhetoric to boot. Ed Morissey:
One can always tell an organization that fails to comprehend the nature and the reach of the blogosphere when “pajamas” gets used as a snide insult. Say, wasn’t this the same candidate who relied heavily on online activism and regularly hailed it as a sign of increased participation in politics? I guess Obama doesn’t value that participation any longer, at least not when being held accountable for his lack of action.
So, in many ways, the homosexual rights coalition is becoming the evangelical Christian community of the left — a reliable voting pool that the Democrats can take for granted. Could it backfire? Maybe, but I doubt it. Similar to evangelicals, homosexual activists have no other viable third party option. They're stuck. So they make a lot of noise and hope the establishment listens.
In the span of a single sentence, President Obama put his administration publicly on the line to press, not only for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, but for the recognition that same-sex relationships are "just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman." It is virtually impossible to imagine a promise more breathtaking in its revolutionary character than this — to normalize same-sex relationships to the extent that they are recognized as being as admirable as heterosexual marriage.
Saying it's breath-taking and revolutionary doesn't make it so. I see no revolution in the states that have already legalized marriage equality – just lower divorce rates than the Bible Belt, and happy, responsible gay couples and families. Quite why conservatives want to keep gay people marginalized, robbed of civic responsibility and cast out of the family remains a function of two things: fear and ignorance. One person at a time, we are doing what we can to defuse both. Obama, for all his ruthless caution, at least understands that. And I truly believe he does.
The Dish 