THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
May 28, 2010
LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PRIDE MONTH, 2010
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
As Americans, it is our birthright that all people are created equal and deserve the same rights, privileges, and opportunities. Since our earliest days of independence, our Nation has striven to fulfill that promise. An important chapter in our great, unfinished story is the movement for fairness and equality on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. This month, as we recognize the immeasurable contributions of LGBT Americans, we renew our commitment to the struggle for equal rights for LGBT Americans and to ending prejudice and injustice wherever it exists.
LGBT Americans have enriched and strengthened the fabric of our national life. From business leaders and professors to athletes and first responders, LGBT individuals have achieved success and prominence in every discipline. They are our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, and our friends and neighbors. Across my Administration, openly LGBT employees are serving at every level. Thanks to those who came before us -- the brave men and women who marched, stood up to injustice, and brought change through acts of compassion or defiance -- we have made enormous progress and continue to strive for a more perfect union.
My Administration has advanced our journey by signing into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which strengthens Federal protections against crimes based on gender identity or sexual orientation. We renewed the Ryan White CARE Act, which provides life-saving medical services and support to Americans living with HIV/AIDS, and finally eliminated the HIV entry ban. I also signed a Presidential Memorandum directing hospitals receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds to give LGBT patients the compassion and security they deserve in their time of need, including the ability to choose someone other than an immediate family member to visit them and make medical decisions.
In other areas, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a series of proposals to ensure core housing programs are open to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. HUD also announced the first-ever national study of discrimination against members of the LGBT community in the rental and sale of housing. Additionally, the Department of Health and Human Services has created a National Resource Center for LGBT Elders.
Much work remains to fulfill our Nation's promise of equal justice under law for LGBT Americans. That is why we must give committed gay couples the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple, and repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. We must protect the rights of LGBT families by securing their adoption rights, ending employment discrimination against LGBT Americans, and ensuring Federal employees receive equal benefits. We must create safer schools so all our children may learn in a supportive environment. I am also committed to ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" so patriotic LGBT Americans can serve openly in our military, and I am working with the Congress and our military leadership to accomplish that goal.
As we honor the LGBT Americans who have given so much to our Nation, let us remember that if one of us is unable to realize full equality, we all fall short of our founding principles. Our Nation draws its strength from our diversity, with each of us contributing to the greater whole. By affirming these rights and values, each American benefits from the further advancement of liberty and justice for all.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2010 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by fighting prejudice and discrimination in their own lives and everywhere it exists.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand ten, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.
BARACK OBAMA
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
When Will We Wake Up ??
The BP (British Petroleum) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a disaster that makes the Exxon Valdez disaster look like spilled milk. As horrendous as this disaster is, the worst part of it all is the unequivocal evidence that people and governments don't run our country, corporations do. For the past 150 years, corporations have slowly, but surely, blurred the lines between government and business. While filming the shores of Louisiana after the spill, CBS was threatened with arrest by BP officials - escorted by the US Coast Guard. Yes - the US Coast Guard told CBS that it's BP that "makes the rules". This is a tremendous WTF? moment. BP has destroyed one of the most fragile and profitable ecosystems in the world. The Louisiana coastline ranks 29th in the global economy. That is gone now... done. Finished. The Gulf of Mexico continues to be polluted by thousand of barrels of crude every hour. It's been 36 days so far, and it keeps on gushing. No one knows how to stop it.
BP has already profited as a result of this disaster in that their insurance company has paid them for the destruction of their digging platform. I haven't even mentioned the 11 men killed, it's too heart wrenching to even write about at the moment. But the countless animals that are dead, slowly and painfully dying, choking, their habitats are destroyed. Whole living ecosystems are dead and the vast amounts of oil are now in the "loop," headed to the fragile coral reef just of the coast of Florida, then the oil will head up the East Coast, polluting the beaches of southern Florida, North and South Caroline, Maryland, Delaware, Long Island and eventually Cape Cod until heading out into the mid Atlantic.
Whose fault is this really? Is it BP's fault? The government's fault? No - it's OUR fault. We, the passive consumers who have over the past 150 years, allowed large corporations to become the behemoths that they are. From oil companies to insurance companies, we are now at the mercy of their whims. They buy elections. They influence voters. They start wars. They destroy our planet, our TRUE quality of life - and we drive up to the pump every day of every year to fill our gas guzzlers with petrol. Thousands of our young men and women in uniform are dead because we must make certain that we have all the oil we need to go on vacations, run our errands and heat our homes. Despicable.
Instead of people waking up and really taking stock in the problems that slowly destroy our lives, we have a group of lunatics who proudly call themselves "The Tea Party" who have their heads so far up their own, ignorant asses, that they believe all the lies that corporate America tells them. They blame Democrats, the government, immigrants - everyone but themselves. They, as the rest of us, need to take a long, hard look in the proverbial mirror and start taking responsibility for the world that we have created.
It's time to wake up, America - before it's too late.
BP has already profited as a result of this disaster in that their insurance company has paid them for the destruction of their digging platform. I haven't even mentioned the 11 men killed, it's too heart wrenching to even write about at the moment. But the countless animals that are dead, slowly and painfully dying, choking, their habitats are destroyed. Whole living ecosystems are dead and the vast amounts of oil are now in the "loop," headed to the fragile coral reef just of the coast of Florida, then the oil will head up the East Coast, polluting the beaches of southern Florida, North and South Caroline, Maryland, Delaware, Long Island and eventually Cape Cod until heading out into the mid Atlantic.
Whose fault is this really? Is it BP's fault? The government's fault? No - it's OUR fault. We, the passive consumers who have over the past 150 years, allowed large corporations to become the behemoths that they are. From oil companies to insurance companies, we are now at the mercy of their whims. They buy elections. They influence voters. They start wars. They destroy our planet, our TRUE quality of life - and we drive up to the pump every day of every year to fill our gas guzzlers with petrol. Thousands of our young men and women in uniform are dead because we must make certain that we have all the oil we need to go on vacations, run our errands and heat our homes. Despicable.
Instead of people waking up and really taking stock in the problems that slowly destroy our lives, we have a group of lunatics who proudly call themselves "The Tea Party" who have their heads so far up their own, ignorant asses, that they believe all the lies that corporate America tells them. They blame Democrats, the government, immigrants - everyone but themselves. They, as the rest of us, need to take a long, hard look in the proverbial mirror and start taking responsibility for the world that we have created.
It's time to wake up, America - before it's too late.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Letter To The Editor
Thanks to Rob Tish for posting this on his wonderful blog, "wakingupnow.com" :
Sharon Underwood wrote this letter to the Valley News in White River Junction, Vermont, in April of 2000.
Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you good people.
I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.
He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “fag” incessantly, starting when he was 6.
In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.
At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won’t get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don’t know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.
If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I’m puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that’s not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?
A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I’ll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for “true Vermonters.”
You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn’t give their lives so that the “homosexual agenda” could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.
He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn’t the measure of the man.
You religious folk just can’t bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.
How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.
You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.
The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about “those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing” asks: “What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?”
Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?
Her son is doing fine now, and was the first member of his family to graduate from college.
Sharon Underwood wrote this letter to the Valley News in White River Junction, Vermont, in April of 2000.
Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you good people.
I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.
He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “fag” incessantly, starting when he was 6.
In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.
At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won’t get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don’t know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.
If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I’m puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that’s not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?
A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I’ll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for “true Vermonters.”
You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn’t give their lives so that the “homosexual agenda” could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.
He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn’t the measure of the man.
You religious folk just can’t bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.
How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.
You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.
The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about “those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing” asks: “What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?”
Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?
Her son is doing fine now, and was the first member of his family to graduate from college.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
