Obama urges African nations to decriminalize homosexuality

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
By BearinFW | 07/25/2015 02:25 PM | 3 comments
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  • Your right on what I meant regarding the Judicial appointment balance. Thanks as always. I seem to be able to say it better graphical than trying to define clarity in my words. It has been proven time and time again that our legal system which was supposed to be a higher sober power over the forces of the body politic is merely just another group of partizans wearing unfashionable gowns. Then again, we have to be grateful that there are people in the court like Kennedy. He is a Republican but not a fundamentalist Republican.
    MachineToole 07/26/2015 01:29 PM
  • Hi Toole. BTW, Obama has had two Supreme Court appointments -- Kagan and Sotomayor. However, they both replaced liberal judges, so they did nothing to change the balance of power. I assume that's what you're talking about but wanted to be clear that he has had a couple, which is probably about average. I guess the big question is whether Ginsburg will step down in time to let Obama get a third appointee. And I don't even know how effective that would be. Can you imagine how hard it would be to get a liberal judge through the current Senate?

    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.
    BearinFW 07/26/2015 12:21 AM
  • I always thought that the president was visited by some of those nice corporate and financial people just after he got into the White House. You know, they might just to talk about some family issues that could possibly come up in the Obama household, and that might be the reason he flipped on so many issues he ran on in his first campaign… But you’re right he is a quite different man in his second term. Perhaps his original lack of insider know-how was a much greater weakness that ‘the forces that be’ took complete advantage of. He is no longer that inexperienced senator from Illinois. There is no question that the world has changed during his administration and on the LGBT side for the better. The disappointment which is out of his control is not having been given the opportunity of replacing a supreme court justice. It would have been especially nice to see Uncle Thomas step down and replaced or any of the other the Republicans on that bench. Therefore the next election is going to be an extremely important one. Remember G.W.Bush was given the gift of replacing two of them with people who will be hanging around for a long time to come.
    MachineToole 07/25/2015 08:15 PM