Barack Obama's ENDA post-mortem: DADT had to happen first
Filed by: Alex Blaze
December 23, 2010 12:00 PM
http://www.bilerico.com/2010/12/barack_obamas_enda_post-mortem_dadt_had_to_happen.php (http://www.bilerico.com/2010/12/barack_obamas_enda_post-mortem_dadt_had_to_happen.php)
Kerry Eleveld published an interview with Barack Obama yesterday in which she asked a few questions about ENDA. Obama basically says that he didn't have time to do more than one piece of LGBT legislation, and here's why it was DADT:
So Congress is a complicated place with 535 people that you have to deal with in order to get anything done. And my belief was when I first came in, and it continues to be, that by getting "don't ask, don't tell" done, we sent a clear message about the direction, the trajectory of this country in favor of equality for LGBT persons. The next step I think would be legislatively to look at issues like DOMA and ENDA. And I'm going to continue to ...
[...]
That's just not how I remember things. They didn't just go into office, announce a grand strategy that started with DADT repeal, push for DADT repeal for two years, and now start looking at ENDA and DOMA repeal.