Skip to main content

UPDATED! Gary Johnson breaking through with some coverage of gay marriage stance

UPDATE--Add Talking Points Memo to the list:

Gay rights advocates on the other side of the aisle had a more measured take on the news.
“It is something that’s exciting. It’s obviously a good thing. This is obviously a step in the right direction,” said Christopher Barron, chief strategist for GOProud, which represents gay Republicans. Barron, who supports Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, sees Obama’s move as purely political. Whereas several Democrats called Obama’s announcement courageous, Barron says it’s anything but. “The calls for him to step up to the plate within his own party had gotten to the point where he couldn’t tamp them down anymore,” Barron said. “I think the president has been overtly political about this from the very beginning. I’m glad he finally got to the right place on this, I just think it’s unfortunate that it had to happen the way it did.”

The Albuquerqe Journal quotes Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson's reaction to President Obama's rather equivocal statement of support for marriage equality:

“Gay marriage equality is not a trick question, and we shouldn’t be getting trick answers from the President of theUnited States. Gay Americans deserve better than a President who winks and nods and tries to convince them that he will protect their rights, but refuses to emerge from the closet and support one of the most basic rights – the right to  equal access to marriage.  And frankly, even opponents of gay marriage deserve the truth from the White House.  Is the President for it or against it? Right now, the Administration is trying to have it both ways.”  
HuffPo does a piece on voter choices with regard to presidential candidates and same-sex marriage and includes Gary Johnson in the mix:


Highlighting the GOP's position on this issue, an issue for which GOProud is attempting to gratuitously attack the president rather than look inward, two-time New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson was run out of the Republican Party primary earlier this year, in part because of his support of full equal marriage rights. As a result Gov. Johnson left the party and now has become the nominee of the Libertarian Party.
--snip--
But if you're a single-issue voter and you're in favor of equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, you now have a choice that at least includes President Obama and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who has more political executive experience than Mitt Romney, a one-term governor, and Sarah Palin, a half-term governor, combined.
This is a start--only a start.  From the leading newspaper in Johnson's own state and HuffPo it is yet another jump to consistent inclusion in the stories posed by CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS et al, but the Gary Johnson/Jim Gray ticket can break into that kind of coverage if they (and we) keep pushing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...