Friday, March 13, 2009

An Easy Call

Obama now has to decide whether to back a court ruling that federal employees are entitled to same-sex-partner health insurance benefits. The Times tries to portray this as a "tough choice" because on the one hand, he repeatedly said he would, but on the other hand, "if he supports the judges and challenges the marriage act, he risks alienating Republicans with whom he is seeking to work on economic, health care and numerous other matters." Which Republicans are those? The entire House Republican caucus at this point would refuse on principle to vote to spend $50 on more soap for the Capitol bathrooms, and there are at least 2 Republican Senators who aren't opposed to same-sex benefits. Where's the risk?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

By proclaiming it a "tough choice" today, the Times enables itself to proclaim it an "act of bravery and principle" when he supports the judges tomorrow.

I wonder if history will record the liberal Democrats' opposition to gay marriage as a classic nudge-nudge wink-wink strategy. Cable TV showed many opponents of Prop 8 who were furious that the Prop 8 folks used Obama's anti-gay-marriage statements in robocalls to turn out voters (especially black voters?) to vote for Prop 8. Yet I didn't see any gay-marriage supporters who said they were mad at Obama for having opposed it in the first place. I guess they saw him wink, and were upset that the wink wasn't visible over the phone?

8:45 AM, March 13, 2009  

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