Gays are upset with Obama

I heard Jim Fouratt on The Colbert Report last night. He told us how upset the homosexual community is that the new president has not given their issues the priority they think they have earned by voting for him.
I don't think they were listening. On the campaign trail Senator Obama promised to be the president of the whole country. That means giving priority to urgent issues that concern the whole country rather than issues of special interest groups. So the president has given priority to rescuing the economy, healthcare reform, financial reform, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. He has been criticized for attempting to do too much at once and is obviously at full stretch in his first five months in office. Which one of these issues does Mr. Fouratt think should take second place to pushing congress to repeal the marriage act.

Mr. Fouratt compares the civil rights situation of Gays to the situation of African Americans before 1968. This is patently absurd. Gays as individuals have the same rights as the rest of us. There are no "separate but equal facilities for Gays". Black and white Gays mingle without danger of being lynched.

Many of the facilities like health insurance protection, were extended by the state and employers on the presumption that the earning potential of a wife would be limited by childbearing and child rearing. The producing and raising of future citizens is a public service.
Where this does not happen, the state is in danger of decline. That is the situation in Russia today.

Gay couples by and large do not make this contribution to the state and escape the associated responsiblities. Therefore, it is hard to see why the same family related benefits should be extended to them except perhaps in cases where they have adopted children.

In any case, I think it is time for us to stop obfuscating on this marriage issue. No right thinking person wants to place gay couples at a practical disadvantage financially or legally. The problem lies at deeper level. The gay community wants the religous community to recognize their unions as the moral equivalent of traditional heterosexual marriages. However, the fundamental basis of traditional marriage is the raising of a family. Indeed the Catholic church considers it a sin for a married couple to have even one sexual encounter which was not open to the possibility of conception. To the religous community, heterosexual behavior entails responsibilities Gays escape. So in my opinion, this demand for moral equivalence is not a reasonable demand.