At least one blogger isn't cheering
yesterday's news that President
Obama has nominated an openly gay lawyer for ambassador to New
Zealand and Samoa.
Openly gay The Atlantic political
commentator Andrew Sullivan is calling the pick a nod to gay
rights group the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and too little, too
late.
“So we now have the slogan that sums
up the Obama record on gay rights: Not much worse than Bush,”
Sullivan wrote in a post titled We
Get A Gay Ambassador!
“[T]he Democratic party which takes
our money and counts on our votes still thinks we can be fobbed off
with gestures and symbols and a nice speech,” he added, referring
to Obama's
planned keynote speech Saturday at the HRC's annual fundraiser.
HRC President Joe Solmonese called the
choice “good for America.”
“And, of course, HRC loves nothing
more than that and they will milk this for more money and even
plusher buildings and higher salaries for their professional
Washington careerists, even as they get nothing done or passed,”
Sullivan continued. “They like it that way. It keeps them in
business. And the love-fest Saturday night will be sick-making.”
But Earl Ofari Hutchinson's Huffington
Post blog post titled Obama
Is Gay's Best Friend – To Say Otherwise Is Shortsighted, Insulting
And Just Plain Dumb, which
appeared on the same day, argues just the opposite.
“Obama is not a
hypocrite or betrayer on gay rights simply because he does not back
gay marriage,” Hutchinson says. “Whenever he's been asked he's
made it clear that he strongly believes that the only marriage that
can be called marriage is between a man and a woman. This has
nothing to do with his solid, and at times outspoken, support for
anti-discrimination, civility, and just plain human respect for gay
rights.”
“Obama is the
best friend that gays have had in the White House – ever,” he
adds.
Sullivan disagrees,
saying that what Obama has done – speechmaking mostly – is simply
window dressing.
“[W]e're not
equals to this president or his party, whatever he says and however
well he puts it. … He knows what to do. And he refuses to do it.
That's more eloquent than any speech ever could be.”