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PDFThe Advocate Endorses Obama 2012
By Scottie Thomaston
The Advocate magazine, established in 1967, has for the first time endorsed a presidential candidate in an election year. Its current issue features an endorsement of President Obama: “In Obama We Trust.” They write:
Never has the substantial progress in equal rights and treatment of LGBT people been more at risk than in this presidential contest. This election presents a choice between starkly opposing futures.
Barack Obama is a leader of undeniable accomplishment, vision, and integrity on LGBT rights. His opponent Mitt Romney betrays equality on numerous issues and aligns himself with a faction of the Republican Party that does not include equality among its declared ideals.
Indeed, Mitt Romney opposes marriage between loving couples of the same-sex, which is a standard Republican position; but Romney goes even further than that – he opposes civil unions for gays and lesbians, something that even George W. Bush supported in 2004, eight years ago. It’s difficult to even conceive of a more regressive candidate – not just on LGBT issues but across the board.
The Advocate‘s article calls attention specifically to the President’s announcement that he personally supports marriage equality:
By saying aloud, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” in a televised interview on ABC, he has sparked conversation domestically and internationally. While he is our president at home, globally he’s an icon, a symbol of the promise of America, of the promise of equality. Obama may be the most prominent man on the planet ever, given the pervasiveness of modern media and his anomalous and historic nature as the first black American president; he is surely the single most recognizable head of state on the globe. By virtue of his unique position, his endorsement of marriage equality is not merely rhetoric. His words constitute action. On the very face of it, his statement is enormous, and has the power to move millions in a way that a statement from no other person could have.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of his announcement that he supports marriage equality. For the first time in our history a president has affirmed the full rights of LGBT people; and in this case, he did so in an election year, the day after yet another state voted to enshrine bigotry in their constitution. For those of us who have been more critical of him over the years, this simple announcement became a game-changer. And on a personal level, I and other LGBT people will finally, for the first time, be able to vote for a President who believes we should be able to marry the person we love.
There is still a lot of work we need to do if LGBT people want full acceptance and all of the legal rights to which we’re entitled. As The Advocate suggests, the President hasn’t fixed everything and there is still a long way to go:
We cannot expect any president to be the balm for all our ills, but Obama has demonstrated through word and deed that he is capable of understanding and tackling the issues, with foresight and intellect, that affect a minority population, particularly the last group of people it’s still legally permissible to deny rights to in the United States.
No one thinks our work is done, and no one thinks that the President’s statement on marriage equality erases the state of legal rights for people who are LGBT – whether it’s marriage, criminal justice, HIV treatment and assistance, employment discrimination or anything else – but we have made progress in ways most of us never imagined, and no one wants to go backward. The president’s support of marriage equality, along with his administration’s historic efforts to defeat the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and the fact that they continue to push for a quick resolution in the Supreme Court has earned him a lot of respect from the LGBT community, even from critics. These are exactly the things we have been pushing so hard for since his inauguration.
The 2012 election is a choice between him and Mitt Romney, a candidate who does not respect the lives of LGBT Americans. The Advocate‘s decision to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades is a testament to how much we have all gotten accomplished in the past four years.
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