No President Has Ever Been Better To Gay People. Thank You President Obama.

[BlueCheese]

98. First, let me offer personal congratulations.

It's well past time for the ugly blight of discrimination to end in this country. We have a long way to go, but this is a step forward.

Now as for being the best president so far on gay rights: well, that's a pretty low bar, to be honest. Times change, and people change with them. To take an extreme example, Reagan was better on racism than Thomas Jefferson. Goerge W. Bush was more enlightened than Abraham Lincoln. The average American of 2013 is better than the average American of any previous year on gay rights.

To me, relative to his time, Obama has been benign, but not forceful, on gay rights. This is a huge improvement on Bush, who was actively hostile, and a mild improvement over Clinton, who was stung early and then frequently caved to political expedience. I'm also not sure why Obama deserves credit over a Supreme Court decision, other than that he appointed two of the justices in the majority. (Of the other three, two were Clinton appointees and one was a Reagan (!) appointee.)

Right now, Obama's official position on gay marriage is that it's a state issue. Can you imagine if that had been Lincoln or LBJ's position on slavery or voting rights?

(Also, I don't really understand why Kennedy gets so much credit for civil rights. He wasn't around long enough, and his contributions were often reluctant. A number of the judges he appointed were more problem than solution.)