by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
During a White House reception for gay activists in honor of gay pride month, President Barack Obama announced that he intends to expand the existing family leave law in order to include the needs of same-sex couples.
The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that the president told the gathering on Tuesday evening that he has directed the Labor Department to broaden the definition of “son and daughter” so that employers will now be required to offer workers in same-sex relationships the right to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for partners’ newborns or to adopt.
“We’ve got a lot of hard work we’ve still got to do,” the president said and boasted of his legislative accomplishments thus far for the homosexual community.
These include signing a new anti-hate crimes bill into law, expanding benefits for partners of State Department employees, and ending the ban on HIV-positive persons from visiting the United States. He has also led the charge to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell law” policy. He has made it a point to mark the annual gay pride month every year and even referenced families with “two fathers” in his Father’s Day proclamation last week.
The announcement marks another step in the president’s piece-by-piece strategy of expanding homosexual rights wihtout causing too much controversy among conservatives. However, the strategy has also cost him the praise of many in the same-sex community who believe he is too slow in delivering on his many campaign promises to this particular voting bloc.
“We still need laws passed that achieve what these minimal efforts attempt to do piecemeal,” said gay activist Lane Hudson to the AP after Tuesday’s announcement.
Others are more realistic. “People wrongly assume that having Democratic majorities in Congress means that your legislative goals will be met,” said Fred Sainz, a vice president at the Human Rights Campaign, Washington’s largest gay rights organization. “That’s not the case.”
During the address, the president renewed his commitment to expanding benefits, including health care, to same-sex partners.
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