Mixed Emotions About POTUS Marriage Announcement

Well, President Obama finally said yesterday in an interview with ABC's Robin Roberts (not sure if we're related) the words that elements of the rainbow community have wanted him to say since 2008 about same sex marriage.



I had no doubts he felt that way based on statements he'd made back when he was an Illinois state senator in 1996 and his record on rainbow community issues since taking office.

As I've said more than a few times, I support same gender marriage and I'm exceedingly proud that it was an African-American president who announced he supports this issue.  Where I part company is not sharing the feeling prevalent in some quarters of the rainbow community that marriage is THE most important issue in the TBLG community human rights push.

And just to remind you what issue I think is most important for the rainbow community, having and keeping a J-O-B is.   But back to this post.

I'm also looking at the big picture here and wondering if in the feeding frenzy to hound President Obama into stating six months before the election that he supports same gender marriage, did the vanillacentric GL community just repeat the political mistake they made in 2004 by pushing same gender marriage when we had the chance to defeat George W Bush that year.

To me and many African Americans trans, gay, straight and cisgender, it is vitally important that President Obama be standing on the steps of the Capitol on January 20 taking the oath of office for his second term.   It puts him in the same historic territory with other two term presidents, gives him a chance to continue building on his legacy and forever removes the possibility that the conservafools can stamp his presidency as a failure despite their best attempts to do so.

It is also important to the African-American community that he be there along with his family in that nice white mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue my ancestors built with their unpaid labor through January 20, 2017.  

The next president will have the opportunity to possibly select three Supreme Court justices.  

Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy were selected by Ronald Reagan, and Clinton appointee Ruth Bader Ginsburg is hinting at retirement from the SCOTUS. 

We have 50 federal judiciary seats open because the GOP is playing the massive resistance game and hoping y'all fall for the okey doke and elect Willard  to the presidency so he can start filling them with federal judges selected by Robert Bork

So yes, GLBT community, it IS about the federal judiciary.   When you can't get legislation through a logjammed Congress, the court system is the next place to redress those grievances we have. 

As we trans people have discovered when we've gone to federal court lately, the president who appoints the people who sit in these judicial seats in an era of hyper partisanship matters. 

As for the assertion that it will cost the off the charts popular President Obama votes in the African-American community, I will defer to the wisdom of Aisha Moodie-Mills and what she had to say about that. 

“It’s really quite ridiculous to believe that black folks would stay home and not vote for the first black president over gay marriage. It’s just ludicrous! No megachurch pastor, as bigoted as he may be, has the power to persuade a whole congregation of black folks to turn against this president.”

So yeah, I'm not fazed about the 4% cookie chomping segment of sellout GOP knee-grows that were already planning to vote for Mitt version 2012.   The last Republican presidential candidate to get more than 15% of the African-American vote was Junior in 2004, and he had the help of 18 anti-gay marriage referenda on the ballot and a legion of sellout knee-grow megachurch pastors such as TD Jakes, Bishop Eddie Long and Donnie McClurkin acting as surrogates to do that.

But I'd be lying if I wrote in this post I wasn't concerned about how this announcement will affect a presidential election that has six months to go.  The facts are many non-white peeps are nervous about this election.  

We already know there's a certain percentage of this electorate who will not vote for an African-American period.   Combined with the fact that ALEC and their GOP legislative partners have been merrily passing voter ID suppression legislation targeted at reducing the number of Black, Latino, senior and student voters going to the polls on November 6 that were the major reasons he took Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico and Indiana, and you can understand why I'm spending a lot of time in prayer hoping that the justice loving part of the American electorate shows up on November 6 to overcome the bigots who will be even more frothing at the mouth motivated to defeat the POTUS.   


I will be watching to see if the Internet chatter and other rhetoric I heard from vanillacentric GL peeps hollering for him to 'evolve already' comes to pass.

May I remind y'all that non-white BTLG people never left him along with those of us liberal progressives who remember our Political Science 101 and 102 that see the big political picture beyond the 'all marriage all the time' agenda. 

I had more than a few testy conversations with the 'evolve already' peeps and GetEqual folks who asserted that the POTUS announcing support of same gender marriage will 'energize the base' and increase support amongst 'the gay community'.

Yeah, I noted the news blurb that stated the POTUS raised $1 million within 90 minutes of making that announcement at 2 PM CDT, but how much of it was from the gay community and are the GayTM's that y'all declared closed to him reopened?


Now that the President Obama has said those five words you wanted to hear, time for y'all to stand and deliver.  Time to circle November 6 on your calendar, get registered to vote and take a bunch of friends to the polls with you because the Tea Klux Klan and friends are damned sure organizing to do the same. 
  .
Now where's my Maalox?