At this time next week, the nation will have a new president. As much as we want to wallow in that reality, the president-elect has gotten way too much of our print space in the last year. The person who really deserves it is President Barack Obama.
In November 2008, PGN was covering the watch party for a local LGBT political hopeful when news came down that Obama had won the presidential election. We watched with awe and tears in our own eyes as a group of elderly black women, clad in Obama T-shirts, cried, hugged and danced. As we readied our tape recorders, snapped photos and mentally crafted the ledes to our stories, we knew it was a moment that was bigger than any of us.
The election of our first black president was a remarkable moment in American history. And the eight years that followed proved just why Obama won the opportunity to be the leader of the free world.
From the get-go, he had expansive and systemic issues to confront, such as a crippling recession and a health-care system that was failing Americans. Despite constant Republican resistance, Obama created and implemented mechanisms to fix institutional issues that for years had been propping up corporations and the nation’s richest on the backs of hard-working Americans.
For marginalized communities, Obama served not only as the leader needed to effect change, but as a symbolic figure demonstrating that prejudice can be fought. His road to being the most LGBT-friendly president in history wasn’t always smooth; Obama took intense heat for not backing marriage equality and moving to repeal the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers early enough. That criticism comes up hollow compared to the LGBT record Obama built.
Under his administration, sexual orientation and gender identity were added to the federal hate-crimes law; the military lifted its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and later permitted open service by transgender individuals; anti-LGBT discrimination in federal contracting was prohibited; the rights of transgender students have been codified. Obama’s administration took unprecedented steps to invite the LGBT community into government: LGBT-inclusive summits on bullying were held at the White House; LGBT people participated in pioneering national studies on issues such as housing discrimination; the president and a sea of administration members delivered “It Gets Better” messages to LGBT youth; and hundreds of LGBT people joined with the First Family each year at the White House for a Pride celebration.
This small snapshot of Obama’s LGBT accomplishments, in the context of the looming doom of the incoming presidential administration, are enough to instill despair in any peace- and progress-loving American. But as Obama emphasized in his farewell address this week, now more than ever we need hope.
The type of hope that Obama embraced for eight years is not an intangible idea, but rather a concept rooted in action. To keep the spirit of his leadership alive, we need to be knocking on doors, contacting lawmakers, supporting progressive organizations and forcefully resisting restrictiveness and every type of -ism that exists.
Obama showed us what hope can achieve. Now it’s our turn.