Yeah, I know some trans-activists have attacked this as being a case of the rich and privileged, but people like Obama who have been selected by the rich are moved by the suffering of the rich and privileged not the poor and oppressed. If you are poor and oppressed you are considered angry and responsible for your own oppression.
The focus on DOMA vs ENDA has an age factor as well. Young people are more concerned about their employment opportunities. Older couples about what happens if their partner gets sick or to their survivor when one or the other of them dies.
Both sides view the other as callous.
From Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110228/us_yblog_thelookout/the-case-that-changed-obamas-mind-on-defense-of-marriage-act
By Liz Goodwin
Mon Feb 28, 2011
The Obama administration announced last week that it will no longer defend in court a part of the Defense of Marriage Act that forbids the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage.
One widow’s story was one of two cases pending in federal courts cited in the announcement of President Obama’s decision, Bloomberg reports.
Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer were together for more than 40 years when Spyer died in 2009. Not longer after her partner’s death, Windsor received a $363,053 federal tax bill–a liability that she would not have faced had the federal government recognized their union.
The New York couple married in Canada in 2007 in their 70s, after they found out that Spyer’s multiple sclerosis was getting worse. Spyer was a psychologist who had become quadriplegic from the disease before her death, and Windsor worked for IBM. They met in the 1960s at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “We danced so much and so intensely that she danced a hole through her stockings,” Spyer said in the New York Times’ write up of their wedding.
Windsor is suing for the tax money back from the federal government, and the Obama administration has effectively decided she’s right by dropping its defense. The administration will continue to enforce the law unless it is struck down by the courts or Congress.
The Justice Department will also drop its defense in a similar case in Connecticut federal court with seven plaintiffs. Each plaintiff in the Connecticut case is a surviving same-sex partner who is being denied benefits because the federal government doesn’t recognize the marriage.
Continue reading at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110228/us_yblog_thelookout/the-case-that-changed-obamas-mind-on-defense-of-marriage-act
Women Born Transsexual 