How to have your big gay moment, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

You don't get many of them, really, in your lifetime. Two or three? Maybe a half dozen, if you're lucky? I suppose it largely depends on the era you get to live in, its energy and pulse, its surfeit or shortage of joie de vivre. Also, who you get as president. And if he or she has any real, you know, balls.

Shall we count Obama's sort of stunning, sort of overdue, sort of obvious, sort of shockingly open-throated support of gay marriage as one of those things? One of those turning points, a truly ballsy, pivotal moment in the culture, in politics, in the way we view ourselves? Is it not something that explodes the way we think and re-orients the nation in the same way his skin color already did, something that, a generation from now, will still be discussed as a watershed moment in the accepted meanings of love, sex and evolution of the human soul?

Damn right we should.

Sure, it's not momentous in the way that, say, Bush's disgusting, failed war on Iraq was momentous. It's not historic in the way that Watergate scarred the soul of the country. It doesn't have quite the perspective-upheaving romance of the moon landing, the jarring heartbreak of the Kennedy assassination, the fire and wow of the fall of the Berlin Wall. ...

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/16/notes051612.DTL&nl=fix)

[lame54]

1. Thank you Joe Biden

[catbyte]

2. Meh. I heard he was planning to announce it on "The View" anyway

[lame54]

4. is that what you heard?...

because I heard Joe say it first

[DCKit]

3. While it may have galvanized the RWingers, Obama's declaration also set a bunch of people free...

from their previous stance of holding back on this particular issue.

Those who disagree never voted for Obama the first time around, those who agree, and those who may not have agreed before, might show up at the polls this time.

It's a winning issue, as much as "Teh War on Women" is a winning issue. The Republics "divide and conquer" isn't going to work so well this time around.

[SidDithers]

5. Morford nails it...

Are you snickering? Are you rolling your eyes and calling bulls--t on the whole gambit? Go for it. You're not alone. I've been enjoying the nasty emails and tweets of a few particularly hardcore gay advocates who are spitting all over Obama and his little coming out party, calling it meaningless lip service, calling it too little too late, calling it negligible in the wake of what he should be doing -- which, if I understand them correctly, is coming over to their house and begging forgiveness for not kowtowing to their every ideological whim.

I'm ignoring them all -- particularly those who are, in their way, just as rigid and unappeasable as any evangelical Christian. It's true that Obama has proven himself to be a wildly uneven president, hugely successful on one hand, infuriatingly weak and ineffective on the other. But by and large (and with some very notable exceptions), when he stakes out a claim, he goes all in. Iraq: ended on time and under budget. Osama: dead. Afghanistan: winding down. The economy: recovering (ugly). Auto industry: saved. Health care reform: a mishandled mess, but still sort of miraculous. Gay marriage? It will prevail, now more than ever.

I've always enjoyed his stuff. Thanks for posting.

Sid

[SidDithers]

6. Kick..nt

Sid

[madokie]

7. Kick

[sarcasmo]

8. Kick!