Gay Rights
Gay partners of federal workers will now receive long-term health insurance, access to day care and other benefits. Federal Housing Authority loans can no longer consider the sexual orientation of applicants. The Census Bureau plans to report the number of people who report being in a same-sex relationship. Hospitals must allow gays to visit their ill partners. And federal child-care subsidies can be used by the children of same-sex domestic partners.
[Under] the Family and Medical Leave Act…a gay federal employee may take leave to care for a child with a gay partner.
So are gay activists happy? Not at all. They feel betrayed.
Gad to see the president is focused somewhere. He’s definitely not faocused on foreign or domestic policy.
If the president thinks he is going to buy off his gay supporters with a few minor changes, he is going to be dissapointed. He’s opened a hornet’s nest and I doubt that he is going to benefit from it.
Everything this White House does seems to be calculated for some political advantage. Nothing seems based on principle. This is the opposite of what we were promised during the last election.
Moving away from the political realm and entering the policy world: do we agree with the policy or not?
This is just one issue about which progressives and liberals are disappointed. I’ve heard numerous accounts of liberals lamenting the fact that President Obama has not aggressively pushed the liberal agenda on everything from gay marriage, to a Medicare for All, to pulling out of Iraq, to taxing carbon, to soaking the rich to subsidize the poor, etc.
The answer: progressives are a rather small group that makes up the far left tail of the bell-shaped voter distribution. Most voters are within one standard deviation of the median voter (either left or right). Any president who allows his policies to venture very far from the center will be a one-term president.
I think we probably have to do these things. It is probably inevitable. Although I thinks gays will discover (as straights long ago discovered) that getting into a marriage is about a thousand times easier than getting out of it.
It’s kind of funny/ironic that the more radical you are, the most people expect out of you. And if you dare to compromise, you end up being punished by your party for defecting from the cause.
And they shouldn’t be happy with Obama. He could issue an executive order and overturn “don’t ask don’t tell”, but decided to have a discussions about whether the military should continue to be irrational. He’s also done quite a bit to undermine all of our finances and life savings. So sure they should be unhappy with him.