Living in an alternate reality *UPDATE*
I think I’m processing history wrong, and I need your help filling in the gaps.
As you know, Obama invited Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration (a much better choice, I might add, than Wright would have been). Some in the gay community, however, are very upset, feeling that Warren’s support for California’s Prop. 8 means that his selection is a direct insult to the gay community. Those are facts.
What confuses me is this statement from Kevin Nash of the Washington Blade (a publication by and about gays):
We have just endured eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality from a president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians.
I know that the Bush administration was not a particularly homophilic administration. Mostly, it was a homo-ignore-it administration — at least, that’s what I always thought. Naff speaks of “eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality from a president….” and I don’t know what he’s talking about. Again, while Bush preside over a political agenda that showered new rights on gays, I don’t recall anything emanating from the White House that was hostile to gays.
One could point to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” but that was a Clinton era relic. So too was the Defense of Marriage Act. While gay marriage became a huge issue during the Bush administration, it was an issue at the state level, not the federal level. What am I forgetting that would see Mr. Naff feel that Bush specifically was responsible for psychic or physical insults to gays?
I should add here that I’m not seeking any input from y’all about the virtues or demerits of the gay agenda, which is a debate for another day. I’m just wondering if I’m missing anything that the President — not the State, not individual preachers or speakers, but the President himself — did that constituted assaults on gays’ “dignity and equality.”
Hat tip: Brutally Honest
UPDATE: Right Wing News has more on the reactions emanating to the Left with regard to Obama’s choice.