Gay and lesbian service members risk their lives to protect ours while their families are denied the critical protections of marriage because of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act.
This video is part of Freedom to Serve, Freedom to Marry, a new multimedia persuasion campaign to highlight the stories of military families harmed by DOMA. The campaign is a partnership between Freedom to Marry and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
Find out more at http://www.freedomtomarry.org/military
Perfect photo is perfect. (via Obamarama)
I marked it as “offensive.”
Hey Mitt, get a load of this.
I’m voting for the President because he takes me seriously. I’m twenty-one years old, and I have a voice and a vote and I refuse to be patronized. And even though I don’t have thousands of dollars to donate to his campaign, I know that the President has my back. How great is it that I live in a country where I feel like my President isn’t out to get me? That’s why I’m proud to be an Obama supporter.
I am proud to be a democrat.
"These are challenging times. But we’ve been through challenging times before, and the United States and Israel have come through them together. Because of our cooperation, citizens in both our countries have benefited from the bonds that bring us together. I’m proud to be one of those people. In the past, I’ve shared in this forum just why those bonds are so personal for me: the stories of a great uncle who helped liberate Buchenwald, to my memories of returning there with Elie Wiesel; from sharing books with President Peres to sharing seders with my young staff in a tradition that started on the campaign trail and continues in the White House; from the countless friends I know in this room to the concept of tikkun olam that has enriched and guided my life."
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Remarks By President Obama At AIPAC Policy Conference. Sunday March 4.
Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics
“If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.”
Tonight, my internet exploded. When I say this, I don’t mean in a way that happens when the Lakers win a big basketball game, or when it starts to snow in Boulder. Or even the Royal Wedding for that matter. Tonight, in a mere matter of minutes my Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Huffington Post page all simply exploded. Osama Bin Laden is dead. Long live the United States of America.
Now, to be honest, my initial reaction was that of surprise. I literally had been on my computer all afternoon working on my exam study guide/playing scrabble on Facebook, and for the hour and a half that I chose to help my boyfriend sort through his closet, Osama Bin Laden had been shot dead in the head. What? Osama dead? COME. ON. I turned on CNN and yep, there it was, the headline to end all headlines, and the promise of a statement within the hour. Then I called my father, which is always a pleasure, because he loves the President just as much as I do, and the phone was answered all I heard was “looks like we’re getting re-elected.” I’d like to mention that my father is also hands down without a doubt the most patriotic person that I know. He loves the United States more than any other person I have ever met, so when events of this nature occur, being around him makes me swell up with pride for this country.
So after being glued to CNN for a good 45 minutes, after watching the President give his speech, and after managing to steal 3 or 4 of my boyfriends t-shirts from the “going to Goodwill” pile, I came home and turned my full attention to the internet. I had missed a lot! A lot of important things! I had Facebook statuses to “like” and funny/insightful tweets to re-tweet! Now there was the funny, like the Facebook page claiming “And THAT’S how the USA outdoes the Royal Wedding” and the Ghost Obama twitter account tweeting “well this sucks … I accidentally enabled location on my tweets.” There were the insightful thoughts about the world celebrating the fact that we took a life tonight, no matter how evil that life was, and that 66 years ago tonight Hitler was also announced dead. And then there was the moving, like the photos from the New York Times of people celebrating at Ground Zero and the tweet I read from someone who had a 9/11 widow on his plane when everybody found out, and that woman breaking down into tears.
And then for me there was the feeling that this moment was much bigger than all of us. You know people who claim to not “get” social media simply do not understand the way that the world is changing. One of my favorite movies is “Live From Baghdad” about CNN at the Gulf War, and tonight I read an article about how Osama Bin Laden’s death is really Twitter’s Live From Baghdad. Being able to have this sort of news at our fingertips is not a bad thing, and our relationship with the media is not necessarily all that bad either. Let’s talk about the guy in Pakistan who unknowingly live-tweeted the death of Osama Bin Laden or the fact that from my bed in Boulder, Colorado, I can see the reactions of students all over this country at various college campuses. Time is changing. We are more connected to one another than ever, and people who claim to not “get” things like Twitter simply do not understand that we now demand our information at a much more democratic level than ever before. If the protests currently going on throughout all of the Middle East demonstrate anything, it’s that information cannot be silenced. The internet gave us all voices, and there are times, like tonight, that we choose to use them constructively to bring us all together.
It’s hard not to feel the level of excitement taking place all over this country tonight. At times like this, the “rally-around-the-flag” effect is contagious; as Americans, I believe that we are brought up with this innate sense of patriotism that is hard to come by in other parts of the world. Go to any country in Europe and people will tell you that they are French, Austrian, German, Spanish, etc. People in the United States don’t identify themselves as Floridian, or Oregonian for the most part. Of course there are some obnoxious exceptions (I am from California, and I will admit to being obnoxious about it) but at the end of the day, we are American, and we live in the United States of America. I hope we all relish in this feeling. Tomorrow will come, and along with it the conspiracy theories about how the death of Osama Bin Laden came incredibly close to the beginning of President Obama’s re-election campaign. Tomorrow airport security will be nuts as we all fear some form of retribution from Al Qaeda and their allies. Tomorrow an international campaign will question Pakistan on why the worlds most wanted man was living two hours outside of their capital city in a mansion no less. Tomorrow there will be lots of questions from lots of people; but tonight, let’s all smile in the fact that no matter how long it might take to achieve, when America says it’s going to do something, you bet that we are going to do it.
