Gay City News: "Hillary Offers Ideas and Solutions"

HILLARY OFFERS IDEAS AND SOLUTIONS

By: TROY MASTERS
01/31/2008

...Both Clinton and Obama support some measure of equality for the LGBT community. Both fall short of supporting gay marriage, but they do endorse civil unions. Clinton supports a trans-inclusive ENDA. She has raised money for LGBT organizations. She protected local AIDS programs from a Bush administration reallocation of funds that would have hobbled or closed vital programs statewide and in other urban areas where, like New York City, the epidemic first raged.

Obama's Senate record on gay rights is similar and he mentions gays on the campaign trail more often than Hillary. But he also gives his mega-phone over to the "ex-gay" movement in an attempt to draw support from conservative African-American voters. Selecting a President to channel Martin Luther King or JFK or FDR is not enough; we need a leader and a doer, not a dreamer. It is fantasy to believe that Obama will usher in an era of bipartisan cooperation and strife-free government.

Obama's race will not automatically facilitate this any more than Hillary's gender will. Obama's pretty platitudes about "hope" and "change" enable him to avoid addressing the ugly problems and the even uglier solutions. It's so beautiful one can easily fail to miss there is a complete lack of policy thought. Charging racism is an easy way to distract almost any critique or conversation. It's impossible to shirk off, dismiss or dispute. That charge has too often been leveled - even at imagined slights and arguable offense - by many who support Obama's candidacy.

Obama's campaign also shows a troubling pattern of capitalizing on the same tiresome, gender-discriminating, Hillary-hating language the Republicans have used for years. Obama points to Bill Clinton's reflection on the history of the African American vote in South Carolina as "troublesome." Clever, even if true, as he manages to play both race and gender in one fell swoop, charging that the "little lady's" husband is race-baiting. When the gender card is played, portraying Clinton as a woman whose surrogates fight for her reinforces the stereotype of women being weaker, while fighting deems her too aggressive, an unattractive ball-buster. Add to that the implication that Hillary can't even control her man. Not fighting is impossible, of course. It paralyzes....

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