an extremely small footnote

[rm]

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/waiting-for-obama-in-grant-park/

Regardless of the aptness of the analogy (which is certainly debatable), it never occurred to me until I read Mr. Krieglstein's comments that anyone anywhere thought we could ever possibly have gay president.

Comments

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Really hard to say. I mean, we've likely already had a queer president so clearly the question is over an openly gay president. I can't hide being a woman, I can hide being queer.

But if you look at history, the sequence is black men, women (generally white then black), then some combination of disabled, gay, minorities, etc, following that. So I think it's likely we'll have a woman for a president before we have an openly gay person in that office.

In fact, I think the very last one "in line" will be an atheist :-P.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I agree with your line-up, and I'm not surprised by the idea of an openly queer president, though such a president will have to be the gay Hillary Clinton, being careful to meet the most conservative standards of normalcy to avoid being thrown out as too weird. Though we have had presidents with significant movement disabilities, they were before the days of television, and that will be another rough psychological battle.

The Republicans have fielded a female VP candidate. It wasn't seen as particularly brave. It was dismissed as cynical pandering to the Hillary Clinton constituency. That's right, they picked up a woman to woo a demographic.

Equal rights for women has slipped into that hazy "oh, is there still a problem with that?" zone, where yes, there obviously is still a problem, but it's below the level where people can talk about it as directly without sounding crazy.

Prop 8 demonstrations are pretty clear evidence that the gay equality issue is still somewhere around "Votes for Women" with all the collapse of society arguments included. But the news cycles are getting shorter, and the changes are getting faster.

I'm pretty confident that we'll get there.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think we'll have women, gay men, and just about anybody before atheists. We've got to get all the way through the "not Christian" and "not particularly observant" territories first.