Senator Obama has his own Hillary/Iraq problem: his tepid support for the twenty million gay and lesbian Americans and our civil rights struggle. I have supported HopeFund for the past two years, and I so far have donated $2,000 to the campaign in 2007. I will not give more time or money until Senator Obama comes clean with gay America.
The Senator's comments both in his writings and earlier this week in New Hampshire to the effect that marriage is a religious bond, which gay Americans have no right to expect, requires urgent explanation.
Senator, you have told us what we are NOT to expect from you.
What do you have to say that is affirmative?
Do you understand that homosexuality is an innate condition, not a choice?
Do you acknowledge that gay and lesbian Americans do not enjoy the rights full citizens of our country enjoy?
For the past nineteen years I have been forced to live overseas because my partner of nearly a quarter century is not a United States citizen. My own family arrived in what later was to become the United States on December 26th, 1620. My forebears have fought and died in every war the country has experienced. Both my partner and I pay taxes in the United States (he has an investment account in the United States, and pays tax on the income from that account). We both are Harvard educated (college and law school in my case). Yet because gay Americans do not enjoy full citizenship in the United States, we cannot go home to California and live in the home we own there. We now are both in our 50s. Time matters, and we URGENTLY await congressional action on the Uniting American Families Act, which will extend immigration rights to gay and lesbian American families.
Our story is but one example of the tragedies gay and lesbian familes face every day in the United States because we cannot marry as other Americans can.
Senator, you can embrace the expedient, and try to waffle your way through the question of civil rights equality for gay and lesbian Americans. Or you can lead, and state a clear and affirmative case, telling us what we can expect in an Obama administration. The Clintons wooed us, and then gave us DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act which set the cause of gay and lesbian civil rights equality back by a decade or more. You can understand we are wary. I can accept that "marriage" in part may be a theological concept, and my partner and I want no part of anyone's theology. Marriage also has civil meaning. If you do not think gay and lesbian Americans have a civil right to marry, you owe it to us and to all voters to make clear what we can expect from you.
