Electric Youth
By Ray Ceo, Jr.
We as a community have been through a lot this past year, and being lied to is one of them. My question is, how much more do we take?
Is President Obama leading the GBLT community on?
On June 29, President Barack Obama had a White House reception to honor GLBT Pride Month. Here, he likened the struggle GLBT people have had for our rights to the one African-Americans have had for theirs, and then made more promises to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, and to end the clearly failed, and overwhelming frowned upon “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy.
President Obama was, for my generation, the hope America needed. We worked on his campaign in overwhelming numbers. People who have never been politically involved, donated from their Facebooks, and a generation that was considered “lost” and “hopeless” found themselves hoping for a restored America. We voted in record numbers, and not for Senator McCain, but for now-President Obama.
The youth had hope in what the man who promised change could bring, and now, looking back at it, I wonder if all of us were deceived.
You see, this little reception comes after President Obama’s Justice Department issued a statement upholding the Defense of Marriage Act, which also compared homosexuality to incest. Under his administration, a document came out that stabbed us, the community that supported him more than 70 percent of the time, in the back. No, strike that, he stabbed us in the heart.
When I walked into the voting booth for the first time for a Presidential election, and I looked at Senator McCain, the same man who handed my father his college degree from Embry-Riddle in Prescott, and compared him to now-President Obama, an inexperienced man with a plan and a damn good speaker, one very simple thing came to mind: my rights.
As a second-class citizen, I have always known how truly valuable voting was. I have always understood that you must vote, because that one vote can change so much. I voted, proudly, for the inexperienced guy who had promised me my rights. A man who said he was going to Washington to change the status quo. A man who said the politics or the lobbying hadn’t influenced him.
What I didn’t know then, was that President Obama is a politician first and a human second. I thought maybe having little experience; he would have really been able to steer clear of the corruption in politics. Honestly, I expected that he had avoided it. I never expected him to stab us the way he did.
But the truth is, I have seen good men turn evil because of politics. I have seen people I once called friends become so filled with power, that they slowly lose sight of who and what they are.
President Obama is like every other politician, determined to keep as much political capital as possible in order to do the other things he finds more important. We as a community have been through a lot this past year, and being lied to is one of them. My question is, how much more do we take?
I’m still mad at President Obama, and I’m waiting for action. No White House reception — no matter how fancy — and no press conference or lengthy speech — no matter how articulate — and certainly no more promises can change that now. But action can, and I’m still waiting for that action.
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