{"id":191671,"date":"2009-07-09T22:25:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T03:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/07\/09\/obama-is-dog-whistle-gay-bashing\/"},"modified":"2009-07-09T22:25:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T03:25:00","slug":"obama-is-dog-whistle-gay-bashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/07\/09\/obama-is-dog-whistle-gay-bashing\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama is Dog Whistle Gay Bashing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Normally, I&#8217;m not a big fan of protest theatrics, to my mind, Code Pink frequently does more harm than good to the cause, but I have to approve of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollcall.com\/news\/36623-1.html\">ACT-UP&#8217;s chaining themselves to the Capitol Rotunda today<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s going on here is that during the campaign, Barack Obama promised to lift the ban on funding needle exchange programs, which:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do not encourage drug use.<\/li>\n<li>Reduce AIDS transmission.<\/li>\n<li>Reduce the cost to society.<\/li>\n<li>Provide an entry point with addicts for counseling.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The problem is that the White House submitted a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2009\/05\/07\/obama-budget-bans-federal_n_199436.html\">budget to Congress still contained the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So this wasn&#8217;t even a matter of his not fighting for the program, it&#8217;s a matter of him <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">submitting language reauthorizing a program that he explicitly campaigned against<\/span> in his budget.<\/p>\n<p>A president&#8217;s budget is purely advisory.  Congress can, and does, amend it, or ignore it, as they see fit, but he is unwilling to even leave out a bit of language authorizing a program he claims to oppose.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americablog.com\/2009\/07\/aids-activists-protest-obama-aids.html\">John Aravosis&#8217;s take on this<\/a><\/p>\n<ol style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">\n<li>The candidate promised to lift the ban.<\/li>\n<li>The White House Web site reaffirmed the president&#8217;s commitment to lifting the ban.<\/li>\n<li>The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.<\/li>\n<li>The president now refuses to lift the ban.<\/li>\n<li>The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting [and] defending the ban.<\/li>\n<li>The spokesman reiterates the president&#8217;s support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>There is a pattern to all this, whether it&#8217;s his sucking up to <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/search?q=donnie+mcklurkin\">homophobic screeds &#8220;reformed homosexual&#8221; Donnie McClurkin<\/a>, using legal arguments equating gay marriage with pedophilia and incest, refusing to take administrative actions to even modestly impede the anti-gay witch hunt in the military, and now affirmatively submitting anti-gay legislation to Congress.<\/p>\n<p>Either there is some real homophobia here, or there has been a political calculus made that appealing to homophobia is a political win, because the opposition wants gay people dead.<\/p>\n<p>At <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">best<\/span>, it&#8217;s no different than the prosecutors in and around Baltimore who will routinely demand more severe sentences in plea bargains for black defendants, because they know that they have a better chance to convict a black man, even in front of a black jury.<\/p>\n<p>I believe that this action has been taken <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">because<\/span> it can be seen as a gay issue, not in spite of it.<\/p>\n<p>This is dog-whistle gay bashing, and it is quite deliberate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Normally, I&#8217;m not a big fan of protest theatrics, to my mind, Code Pink frequently does more harm than good to the cause, but I have to approve of ACT-UP&#8217;s chaining themselves to the Capitol Rotunda today. What&#8217;s going on here is that during the campaign, Barack Obama promised to lift the ban on funding &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1142,967,1030,978,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-bigotry","category-lgbtq","category-politics","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}