However, Obama’s evolving record towards gay rights illustrates a forward thinking policy worth emulating by other nations.
“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law,” said Obama in his State of The Union Address. “For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”
Senator Kerry’s act has roots in the Uniting American Families Act, a piece of legislation which has continually failed to win enough support to leave the House of Representatives. The act outright failed or was tabled 11 times since it’s first proposal in the year 2000, which may serve to illustrate how Obama’s presidential celebrity can break legislative deadlock.
Sen. Kerry’s bill’s likely inclusion into the Obama administrations bipartisan efforts to reform immigration must be seen as conclusion to a decade’s worth of debate over whether same sex couples deserve the same rights as heterosexual ones.
Up to 40,000 U.S. nationals will be affected by a policy which grants them and their permanent partner a legal path to citizenship, reports the Washington Post. Family repatriation has been a central part of American immigration policy since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and has since reunited thousands of families starting new lives.
While Christian groups have opposed Senator Kerry’s bill and other acts like it, Obama must continue fighting to build reform. With immigrants becoming an important group in our economy, pushing immigrants away can be the difference between building an economy of innovators, and merely a satisfactory one.
Beginning boy scout reforms to allow gay scout masters shows how deep Obama’s willingness is to tackle injustice towards America’s gay communities. Obama’s honorary presidential role of the Boy Scouts of America allowed him to push forward reform quickly. The gesture, though largely symbolic, should resonate loudly for all Americans – discrimination will not be tolerated.
Obama’s moves are reminiscent of Emily Lazarus’ Statue of Liberty poetic inscription “The New Colossus,” which promotes America as a land where the world’s “tired, huddled masses, yearning to be free,” can call home. Whether it was Jewish, Dominican, or Chinese, America has been extolled as a nation free of the persecution of immigrants’ former homelands.
Lazarus’ poem portrays that emigration to America must be read as a story of escaping intolerance. For our nation’s newest members, America is just not America if there is no freedom to be who they want to be.