President Obama spoke of morality the other day in an almost universally-praised speech about the murders and mayhem in Arizona. He gives a good speech. We already knew this. But this president seems not to have moral values. If he had some, he'd stand up for what's right. He never does that.
Today, three days before Martin Luther King Day, the Obama administration filed a brief in support of DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which is expressly designed to oppress gay people and deny them the right to marry.
When asked directly about his position on gay marriage, Obama freely states that he hasn't decided yet if it's okay. This is not different from a white president saying he can't decide if black people should be allowed to marry. There is not one iota of difference between these two things.
But then, this is a man who continues the policy of perpetual wars, who sends drones nightly to kill innocent Afghan families, who continues to torture people in secret prisons (and American prisons!) and holds people in an endless state of solitary confinement though they are charged with no crime.
If Obama knew right from wrong, the public option would be in the health care bill -- because he would have fought long and hard for it. He would speak out against rampant taser use, the rising police state and the wearing of guns in public. If Barack Obama was a moral man, Bradley Manning wouldn't be sitting in solitary confinement, tortured by Americans. And the US would not be fighting to have Julian Assange jailed or killed for practicing journalism. But the man doesn't know right from wrong. He shows us this again and again. When it counts, he's nowhere to be found.
Morality is a land far away from the world of Barack Obama. And this is entirely of his own choosing. I have come to believe he is not a good man, and I say this as someone who cried with joy when he was elected, if only for what the moment represented. But even then, in my heart I knew the man was an illusion. He had already announced that Rick Warren, a virulently homophobic preacher, would deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I knew right then who Barack Obama was.
Barack Obama is not a good man.
