Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

No Matter Their Impact, Historic Words

By FRANK BRUNI May 9, 2012, 4:09 pm

It will be a few hours still before we learn all that President Obama said to ABC News this afternoon, before we can fully parse the words and analyze their effects, as we surely will. That’s our job. That’s our obsession.

But make no mistake: history was made today, and millions of Americans right now feel that their country has shown them a new, heightened degree of the respect they richly deserve.

Our highest elected official, our president, said that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, something that none of his predecessors had done, something that he had refused to do since becoming a national political figure. There’s a powerful message in that.

For a variety of reasons, marriage equality over the last five years became the issue that gay men and lesbians put their chips on, and it became the test of where you stood on the question of whether they warranted equal treatment under the law, whether they were worthy of full acceptance into American life. It evolved, even as the president did, into a matter as grandly symbolic as it is legalistic and practical.

So for Barack Obama to say — as it’s clear, from the ABC excerpts already released, that he did — that he supports the right of gay men and lesbians to marry is for him to communicate, at long last, from the tallest and most important bully pulpit in the world, that he sees us as the equals of all other Americans, our humanity as unassailable, our dignity as unquestioned, our contributions as vital and meaningful.

Over recent days it has been observed that the president’s position on this didn’t and wouldn’t make an immediate or enormous difference in the actual law of the land. That remains true. States decide on marriage — as North Carolina did, regressively, on Tuesday — and no signal or word from the president is going to translate into the legalization of same-sex marriage from coast to coast.

But that doesn’t diminish the emotional importance of what just happened.

I find myself thinking about all the teenagers and young adults out there who cower in silence because they worry about being ostracized if they speak the truth about their sexual orientation. I think about the ones who are bullied, even the ones who contemplate taking their own lives.

And I think about what it will mean to them to hear the president say what he did today, not because they’re focused on marriage but because they’re buoyed by any and every reassurance that there’s nothing wrong with them, nothing inferior about them. Today their president gave them that reassurance.

I think about how it would have felt to me when I was 16, and fearful, and often deeply, deeply depressed, to hear a president say what ours did today. I can’t imagine it. In the three decades since, our country has traveled an enormous distance, and today is a poignant and compelling marker of that.

Hooray for President Obama, who indeed risked something today. You will hear in the coming hours and for the rest of the week that because of Joe Biden’s bit of Sunday-morning loquaciousness, Obama more or less had to do this, lest he diminish his “brand” of high principle and authenticity, lest he lose moneyed gay donors, lest he look like a troglodyte in an administration of more enlightened sorts.

And perhaps he and his aides did conclude that politically, this was the optimal course, the better wager.

But there’s plenty of doubt and plenty of dispute about that. Plenty.

So hooray for all of us. At a time when it’s often hard to feel anything but cynicism about those who govern us and about government itself, we were just treated to something that looks, to these eyes, like leadership — and maybe even bravery.


http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/no-matter-their-impact-historic-words/?hp