Obama ‘hopeful’ over LGBT attitudes in young people
By Ben Kelly
President Obama has expressed his hope for the future of America, as seen through the positive attitudes of the country’s youth towards LGBT people.
In a YouTube special, the president spoke to three vloggers in the White House, including Ingrid Nilsen, who came out as gay last year. He marvelled at the “amazing strides” of gay rights in the past few decades, and attributed it to “the incredible courage of people who had the courage to come out and say – here’s who I am – but who did it 20, 30 years ago, when it was incredible tough.”
Speaking of his daughters, Obama said, “The thing that makes me most hopeful is when I talk to Malia and Sasha, young people of your generation – their attitudes are so different, and the notion that you’d discriminate against someone because of sexual orientation is so out of sync with how most young people think – including young Republicans, young Democrats.“
Asked by Nilsen if the recent objection to same sex marriage by an Alabama judge should worry people that LGBT rights are not here to stay, Obama said that wasn’t the case, and that this was just a “temporary gesture” from someone who could not succeed in overturning “the law of the land.”
“The Supreme Court has ruled that under the constitution, everybody in all 50 states, has the right to marry the person they love,” he confirmed.
He also spoke about preventing LGBT discrimination in issues of employment and housing, as well as bullying in schools as areas where Americans still had some way to go towards changing attitudes.
President Obama famously claimed in 2012 that it was the influence of his teenage daughters which brought him round to the position of supporting same sex marriage. His younger daughter Sasha even took a rainbow bag on a trip to Africa, when the president tackled the thorny issue of gay rights there.
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