President Obama's Truly Historic Celebration of Pride (Plus, Some Shame)

The first African American President goes on to be the first President to end discrimination against gays in the military and the first to advocate for gay marriage while still in office. These are truly stunning and promising historical developments. (As an anti-militarist queer who disdains marriage as a vestige of human trafficking, I still celebrate such assimilationist achievements as clear landmarks in the democratic project to implement equity-in-diversity, but also because I think the gesture of disdaining war and marriage and heteronormativity is much stronger when you are actually included in what you refuse rather than already excluded from it.) This pitch-perfect appeal to fairness, to tolerance, to ongoing democratic struggles for reform is a marvel to behold. Just think how much more splendid still would be these accomplishments in our long struggle for civil rights if the man who is uttering them to my delight and my pride were not, at the very same time, also crafting secret extra-judicial lists of people to assassinate by remote control robot drone while calling civilian casualties of these killings terrorists too just because they happen to be adults in the wrong place at the wrong time as we kill them.