Here is Michael Tomasky’s latest essay at The Daily Beast on the subject of the political viability of President Obama endorsing gay marriage. Mr. Tomasky assures the reader that he is on the right side of this issue, a quote from his colleague Peter Beinart on ‘America’s moral destiny’ as related to gay marriage, as exemplary of his support for marriage equality, rings hollow as he habitually repeats a riff on Augustine, but not right now. Bourgeois hypocrisy makes it possible for President Obama to publicly sympathize with the family of Trayvon Martin, while the blood of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki has been recently washed from his hands, for reasons of state: the ‘pragmatism’ that Mr. Tomasky advocates share that common root. There is in this essay a great deal of recalled history, a vulgarizing blend of kitsch and realpolitik, that speaks to the politics of the admonition of ‘not right now’, but the demonstrations of history, of morality, of American legal precedent more broadly viewed, less rhetorically, ideologically proscribed, point inexorably in another direction. Will President Obama provide the answer to Mr. Beinart’s idea, indeed question of ‘America’s moral destiny’? Which in the strictest terms could be named leadership: the president could consider the advice of Mr. Tomasky as valuable, in terms of political realism, but incomplete and historically indefensible, and more importantly as an expression of a politically exhausted gradualism?

Queer Atheist