Obama gay bars chicago
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Warren’s prominent position at the inauguration felt like a slap in the face.
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Warren had been an outspoken supporter of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that had brought marriage for gay couples to an immediate halt just two months earlier, crushing the spirit of the gay community in California and nationwide. He invited Rick Warren, the evangelical megachurch pastor from Southern California, to give the invocation at his inauguration. These historic successes, on his watch and with his help, meant that LGBT rights, and marriage equality specifically, would be at the center of the legacy he’d leave behind.įor gay rights advocates, the Obama presidency got off to an inauspicious start. A confluence of good timing, a strategic and determined advocacy movement, and a president who saw with increasing clarity that the values inherent in our cause were fully in sync with his deepest values, enabled this journey. It is now easy to envision the completion of this civil rights battle before Obama leaves office. In particular, the president has been a key part of landmark achievements on the freedom to marry, from the gutting of the Defense of Marriage Act to winning marriage in state houses and courtrooms. Today, just over a decade later, he has done more for gay rights than any other US president. They were not one of his core political priorities. Obama, in other words, began his political journey sympathetic to gay rights, but not deeply informed about them. He finally succeeded in a 2004 debate on Chicago’s public television station. It wasn’t long after marriage for gay couples had become legal in Massachusetts, and the virulently anti-gay Keyes kept trying to bait Obama into discussing the subject. Thompson gave Obama a primer, glad that they could have an honest back-and-forth.Īfter Obama won the Democratic primary in his Senate race, he wound up facing the ultra-conservative Republican Alan Keyes in the general election. And yet he had never heard of the event that many consider the birth of the modern gay rights movement: the riots that took place at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969, when the LGBT community fought back against police intimidation and arrest and demanded legal equality. This was a sophisticated Columbia- and Harvard-educated scholar and political organizer, running for national office. “You’ve never heard of it?” Thompson asked in surprise. In the course of this conversation, he happened to mention Stonewall. Thompson drew an analogy to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, about an African-American who thought of himself as invisible to the white society around him. Candidate Obama simply talking about the LGBT community signaled to them that they were being seen and heard. That was no longer the case for African Americans or women, but for the gay community, it remained true, at least in certain segments of society. Thompson explained that this kind of explicit recognition was important because there were still many people who thought legal rights for gays and lesbians wasn’t a legitimate conversation. For instance, he was curious to know why it was so important to the gay community to be consistently mentioned by name. During the four-hour drive, Obama took the opportunity to ask Thompson some questions about the gay community that had been percolating in his mind during the campaign.