Obama gay rights

The Obama Administration continues to engage systematically with governments around the world to advance the rights of LGBT persons. The Administration’s leadership has included various public statements and resolutions at the UN. Over nearly two decades in politics, Obama has staked out changing positions on gay rights.

Here are the biggest milestones. Obama helped lift the ban on LGBTQ people serving openly in the military, granted federal contractors protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and put a historic number of LGBTQ people in high-ranking positions. Obama, in other words, began his political journey sympathetic to gay rights, but not deeply informed about them.

They were not one of his core political priorities. Obama will sit down with "Good Morning America" anchor Robin Roberts today at the White House for a wide-ranging interview, his first since Vice Joe Biden publicly voiced his support for same-sex marriage and North Carolina voters imposed a new ban on all same-sex unions. While the world was watching America's gay rights transformation, the Obama administration was pursuing a quieter mission to export the same freedoms overseas to places like sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and eastern Europe.

The U. It was a mission animated in part by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's declaration that "gay rights are human rights. Yet the U. In an Associated Press interview, Rice said both the U. She argued that despite a cascade of pressing global crises, the White House had tried to "deal with the urgent and deal with the important, and even if the important is, some might say, optional, it's important. In its latest push to use dollars as leverage, the Obama administration announced Wednesday it is enacting a rule prohibiting U.

Agency for International Development contracts from going to groups that discriminate in delivery of services. That means a clinic, food program or shelter can't refuse services to a gay or transgender person. Yet even in countries where legal protections have improved, like Brazil and Argentina, it's difficult to draw a straight line between U.

In Uganda, a court eventually invalidated an anti-gay law the U. But in Gambia, anti-gay rhetoric has escalated despite a U. The growing focus on gay rights in diplomacy mirrored the shift in attitudes in the U. As with its domestic efforts, the Obama administration faced objections from social conservatives and some religious groups at home and abroad who called it an inappropriate use of government to infringe on others' cultural beliefs.

A memorandum signed by Obama directed the government for the first time to use diplomacy and foreign aid to "promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons.

when was gay marriage legalized

A speech by Clinton to the U. Mira Patel, a former State Department adviser now working on Clinton's ial campaign, said she was shocked when the secretary first used the line publicly at a pride reception for U. At the United Nations, Rice and other diplomats secured language in several resolutions opposing discrimination or condemning extrajudicial killings of LGBTQ people.

For Obama, who only came around to fully embracing gay rights while in office, the campaign came to a head last year in Nairobi, Kenya. Warned in no uncertain terms ahead of his visits to keep quiet about gay rights, Obama called for equal legal treatment for gays while standing next to Uhuru Kenyatta, who brushed it off and insisted it was "not really an issue.

Bisi Alimi, a Nigerian gay rights activist, said that advocacy was critical to helping dissolve what for many Africans has been a persuasive argument against gay rights: that the U. In Uganda, the U. But activists said heavy-handed U. Two years earlier, stolen diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed Ugandan activists had insisted to U. Rice said the key was to tailor efforts to each country's circumstances, limiting advocacy to behind-the-scenes meetings when a public push might cause more harm.

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