I’ve been supporting Barack Obama pretty strongly in the 2008 Presidential Election for several months now. Leaving aside my previously discussed concerns about John McCain and Sarah Palin, the fact is that I agree with Senator Obama’s positions on foreign policy, economics, health care, ethics, education, immigration, and most other issues. Just as importantly, his intelligence and non-combative attitude are a major step above anything we’ve seen on the national stage in quite a while.
Photo by Ethan Miller, Awesome by Barack Obama.
That’s not to say that I agree with Obama on everything. The biggest problem I’ve had is with his stance on LGBT rights. On the one hand, he supports the Matthew Shepard Act, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, and adoption by gays and lesbians, he wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and he opposes a Constitutional Amendment saying that we can’t get married.
On the other hand, Obama wants civil unions, but not full marriage equality for gays. [insert record scratching to a halt here]. That’s a BIG other hand, you know what I mean? Separate But Equal (which is what civil unions amount to) is unconstitutional, but he wants to apply it to this one group.
I’d planned on voting for him anyway, hoping we could make better headway with an Obama administration than a McCain administration. But today, we got a glimmer of —dare I say it?— hope while talking to NBC’s Brian Williams about how he would choose a Supreme Court Justice.
http://blog.mattalgren.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/Barack-Obama-SCOTUS.flv
And so my criteria, for example, would be— if a Justice tells me that they only believe the strict letter of the Constitution– that means that they possibly don’t mean— believe in— a right to privacy that may not be perfectly enumerated in the Constitution but, you know, that I think is there.
I mean, the— the right to marry who you please isn’t in the Constitution. But I think all of us assume that if a state— decided to pass a law saying, “Brian, you can’t marry the woman you love,” that you’d think that was unconstitutional. Well, where does that come from? I think it comes from a right to privacy— that may not be listed in the Constitution but is implied by the structure of the Constitution.
So yeah, Barack Obama has my vote. I hope he has yours too.
hope
(H/t: GoodAsYou.org)
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