Hope and Expectation as Presidential Rhetoric

On or about February 4, 2014 President Obama was quoted as saying during a nationally broadcast address, "We may disagree about gay marriage, but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are -- whether it's here in the United States or ... more extremely in odious laws that are being proposed most recently in Uganda". Statements attributed to Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have also spotlighted the United States liberal stance on gay rights and the extreme anti-gay law, now recently approved, in Uganda. This liberal stance is reflected in the recent veto of an Arizona "gay rights vs Christian rights" law by the governor of said state and the growing trend toward adoption of many pro gay rights legislations in several other states.

Although this issue deserves more attention than I could muster here I will simply relate the afore mentioned remark by President Obama to the class reading entitled "The Contextual Presidency: The Negative Shift in Presidential Immigration Rhetoric" by Damien Arthur and Joshua Woods. This article specifically addresses the issue of immigration rhetoric but also speaks of how presidents use their rhetoric to bring about desired, but as yet unrealized, results. In the opening paragraph of Arthur and Woods' article they write, "The rhetoric is supposed to bring about a desired result...presidents “go public” with their requests with the hope that it will translate into policies". President Obama's remark deftly sidesteps the issue of state's rights concerning marriage and instead focuses on human rights in hopes, I surmise, to influence foreign and domestic policy.

This issue has sparked debates concerning tolerance, state's rights, human rights, legal precedent, and more. One of the more interesting sources I reviewed spoke of the United States as being founded on the principle of a morality of rights rather than a morality of ends as per the following excerpt; "Writing in the wake of Europe's religious civil wars, the liberal thinkers who most influenced the American constitutional framers (John Locke and Montesquieu) treated disagreement about ultimate ends as the normal condition of social life, and then sought to find common moral ground shared by every faction within society, regardless of the ends they pursued. That common ground turned out to be a belief in individual dignity and rights to life and liberty that flow from it" (Linker, Damon. How conservatives lost the culture war. The Week.com)

For those that enjoy a dramatization of some of the issues I offer the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYaewOBGybw

For those that prefer stark reality:
http://www.towleroad.com/2014/02/here-is-the-text-of-ugandas-anti-homosexuality-law-read-it.html