Glenn Greenwald (who is Gay) Reports on Obama Withdrawing DOMA!

Obama Withdraws Support for Anti-LGBT Defense of Marriage Act


The U.S. Department of Justice has announced it will no longer defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional law attorney and legal blogger for Salon.com, who is openly gay, talks about the significance of this decision and how DOMA affected his own choice to live in Brazil with his partner, a Brazilian national. "This is one of those rare instances where I think true and unqualified praise is deserved for the White House," Greenwald says.


http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/24/obama_abandons_defense_of_marriage_act

"For two years now, the Obama DOJ has been defending the constitutionality of DOMA in federal courts around the country. In response to objections from gay groups, Obama officials -- and their supporters -- insisted that the President had no choice, that it's the duty of the Justice Department to defend the constitutionality of all laws enacted by Congress, and that it's dangerous for the President to pick and choose which laws to defend or not defend. That's actually a reasonable position; there is a genuine danger in having the President selectively defend Congressional statutes (although many past administrations have refused to defend particular laws where they believed they could not in good faith do so). Although I believe it is appropriate in rare cases for the DOJ to refuse to defend a statute or even affirmatively argue for its unconstitutionality (provided it continues to enforce the law until it's repealed or struck down), there is a valid concern on the part of those who argue -- as Obama supporters did for the last two years -- that it's never appropriate for the DOJ to refrain from defending a statute or, at least, that it would be wrong to do so in the DOMA case.

But for those loyal Obama supporters who spent two years defending the administration's DOMA position on this ground: if they have even a minimal amount of intellectual honestly, shouldn't they now criticize the President's reversal, this new refusal to defend DOMA? If they really believed what they were saying for the last two years -- that a President is required to defend the constitutionality of all statutes -- then shouldn't they be vocally condemning Obama now for doing exactly that which they insisted he has no power to do? Of course -- as the torture photo and civilian trial controversies also demonstrated -- one of the joys of partisan fealty and devotion to a leader is that one need not have any actual beliefs or positions: you get to say whatever you need to say at any given moment to justify the leader's conduct, even if it completely contradicts what you said months or weeks earlier in service of the same objective. Justifying the leader's behavior is the sole prism through which the entire political world is viewed; one is blissfully liberated from the need to formulate any actual views or principles."

...points out that the author is gay. I'm not sure that an "outing", even if he has spoken of his sexuality in the past, is really relevant to the article, or adds weight to the argument.

Of course, I feel comfortable making this comment because I have lots of gay friends. There names are.........

He is openly gay. Nobody is outing him. Sometimes a person's sexual orientation is actually pertinent.

So they feds won't discriminate if states don't.