It would have been easy for the president to be quiet on the topic during his current visit to Kenya, but instead he stands up for the gay people of Africa, who are some of the most oppressed gay people on the planet. Obama has been an amazing president on gay rights, and has done more to advance the issue than all previous presidents combined. Now, I realize that some of that is the product of changing times, but he still deserves a lot of credit for keeping gay issues at the fore, especially during his second term.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-clashes-kenya … 54118.html
Unfortunately, don't see any of the conservative justices leaving anytime soon. But we can always hope :)
BTW, I wouldn't object to term limits on the court, as some conservatives have suggested. However, I would oppose any type of election, as that injects even more politics into a court. Believe me, we know all about the pitfalls that go with an elected judiciary here in TX! For example, because our state Supreme Court judges are all elected, and therefore all Republican, it is absolutely impossible to get any kind of pro-gay ruling from them, as they are afraid of losing re-election. Just last week, they threw out Houston's anti-gay discrimination ordinance even though their legal reasoning to do so was nonsense!
I wasn't convinced of Obama's gay rights bona-fides when he was first elected, and his first term didn't do much to change that until right at the very end, when he pushed to get Don't Ask Don't Tell overturned. I imagine he was following advice after Clinton's mishap and didn't want to do much on the gay front, for political safety, until his second term. As a result, we don't have much in the way of high-ranking gay appointees, but that would be the only area where Obama has fallen short on gay matters.