I Just Had a Minor Epiphany

We were having a discussion of politics at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, and JR noted that his wife was a big fan of Corey Booker until he voted against drug re-importation from Canada, and now he is politically dead to her.

This developed into a discussion of what I call the, "political event horizon," that point where a politician you are vaguely positive towards does something so hacktacular that that you wash your hands of them.

In the course of discussion, I realized that my two major downgrades of major Democratic Party figures from vaguely promising to weasels, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were both about the same thing:  Throwing the LGBT community under the bus.

In Clinton's case, it was "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and in the case of Barack Obama, it was his embrace of homophobe Donny McClurkin in late 2007 to appeal to socially conservative South Carolina primary voters.

LGBT rights are a moral stance, and when people throw them over for ephemeral political benefit, it says something profound about their profound lack of ethics.