Don’t hold your breath for a presidential endorsement of gay marriage this year. Houston Mayor Annise Parker said she would be “shocked” and “surprised” if President Obama were to endorse same-sex civil marriage equality before the November election. Parker, who is a Democrat and a lesbian, spoke last night to a convention of LGBT editors and bloggers held in Houston, sponsored by the Haas Jr. Foundation and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA).
“I would be shocked to see it and I would not expect it,” Mayor Parker said of a pre-election marriage equality endorsement. She added, “If he does more power to him but I would be surprised.”
Parker, who would like to see same-sex marriage as a plank in the 20120 Democratic platform, is a co-chair of Mayors for the Freedom to Marry, Freedom To Marry’s coalition of now almost 200 mayors who support the freedom for gay and lesbian couples to marry.
“In the next ten years, these are all going to fall, ” Parker says of discriminatory and unconstitutional measures like DOMA, the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
And while Parker knows that mayors who support marriage equality do so because they believe it’s simply the right thing to do, she also knows that as mayors, their job is to be strategic and do what will help their cities, even if supporting marriage doesn’t “win any brownie points from their constituents.” But she adds that “if they thought it would hurt their cities they wouldn’t do it.”
On why the GOP has been waging a war on women, in addition to attacking gay rights, Parker says, “I think the far right rode the LGBT horse into the ground and now they’re riding a different horse.”
Parker also briefly spoke to the Trayvon Martin murder, and noted that while the President said if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin, Parker said, “I have a son that looks like Trayvon,” and added, “I think there’s been a miscarriage of justice.”