John Pilger: Obama, Gay Marriage & Manning

Never forget that Bradley Manning, and not gay marriage, is the issue

Barack Obama’s sudden “conversion” to the cause of same-sex marriage barely disguises the prime motives of a president as reactionary and violent as George W Bush.

'In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When recently Obama announced that he supported same-sex marriage, Nato planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consum­erism and the media, with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.
'The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black American president because he “offered hope” was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction. No “issue” diverts attention as successfully as this: not the free vote in parliament on lowering the age of gay consent promoted by that noted libertarian and war criminal, Tony Blair; not the cracks in “glass ceilings” that contribute nothing to women’s liberation and merely amplify the demands of bourgeois privilege.
'Legal obstacles should not prevent people from marrying each other, regardless of gender. However, this is a civil and private matter; bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right. The rights historically associated with marriage are those of property – capitalism itself. Elevating the “right” to marriage above the right to life and justice is as profane as seeking allies among those who deny life and justice to so many, from Afghanistan to Palestine...'

John Pilger, New Statesman.