Newsom: Obama Inexcusable on Gay Rights
So, I think the headline is pretty accurate, but a lot of the things that Mayor Newsom says are just silly at best, and delusional at worst.
There is some belief that [Obama] actually doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage.
Why would that be? Maybe it’s because he said that he believed marriage was between a man and a woman during the campaign? Newsom says he understands this position “tactically,” for campaign purposes, but that’s really not much better because it implies that (1) Obama didn’t care enough about gay marriage—an important issue to a lot of his supporters—to say so during the campaign, and (2) Obama will do anything, say anything, lie about anything to get elected. Not exactly the picture you want to paint of a politician, especially one from your own party.
But it’s fundamentally inexcusable for a member of the Democratic Party to stand on the principle that separate is now equal, but only on the basis of sexual orientation. We’ve always fought for the rights of minorities and against the whims of majorities.
Except for, you know, the 100 years from the time of the Civil War up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when they actively opposed equal rights for all. Maybe Mayor Newsom should meet with Senator Byrd to talk about how the former Exalted Cyclops felt about “separate but equal.” These statements reveal a total ignorance of the facts and an ill-founded belief in what the Democrat Party has “always stood for.” Every party is flawed, not every policy is good, and pretending that the Democrat Party is—and has always been—unblemished and ideologically pure is just crazy.
They also suggest that lying about your policy positions in order to get elected is a completely acceptable campaign tactic. And I’m not really okay with that. I’d rather lose because of my principles than win after I twisted myself in a pretzel lying to make everyone like me. (This is probably why I will never run for office. Also, because I probably pop up as a search result when you type in “Slave Leia pictures,” which would scandalize the Children or something.)
It’s pathetic that so many people fooled themselves into believing that Obama was lying about his position on gay marriage because he didn’t want to lose Independents, conservative Democrats, or cross-over Republicans. And it’s pathetic that they keep giving him a pass on all these issues that are supposedly important to them. (At least Newsom seems to have stuck to his guns. That’s admirable, and if it’s true, then Obama and the rest of the Democrat Party can learn a lot from him.) They’ve let him get away with dragging his feet on DADT, and even though they were initially pissed about the memo about DOMA, they seem to have given him a pass on that, too. The “it’s okay to lie to get elected” principle definitely backfired, but I don’t see how these people can really feel betrayed when Obama explicitly stated that marriage was between a man and a woman during the campaign. That’s a pretty unequivocal statement. It’s not like he waffled and said it was above his pay grade or something.