obama and the gay medical rights mandate

Naturally, my immediate reaction to the news was positive. And then I was annoyed that the coverage was skewed, because it was already discussing the political implications, when this is really just about basic human decency. But now that I'm reading the articles in full, like this one at NYT and this one at WaPo, I have another set of thoughts.

We know that President Obama says he does not support same-sex marriage. I believe this is his sincere sentiment. A lot of Democrats in prominent positions have claimed to be against gay marriage, but you can still hold out reasonable hope they are just politicking - real progressives all support it, right? But something about Obama suggests to me that he does believe what he says about gay marriage, and that's not such a great thing.

I'm wondering if there's a (sort of nefarious?) strategy here. Will those 1100+ benefits of marriage just be granted, piecemeal, to same-sex partners, through a series of federal mandates and executive orders? That will give us many of the rights we deserve, but also possibly undercut the marriage movement, since the concrete aspects to the movement's raison d'etre -- the legal inequalities -- will have been removed. You can see here Obama's true position, I think: he believes strongly that discrimination against LGBT people is wrong, because he broadly applies liberal, civil rights principles to us. But he does not understand what makes our struggle exceptional, and so his politics do not reflect that.

LGBT people are exceptional. We aren't just a group of people who have been arbitrarily discriminated against and undermined. We are a group of people whose very ability to live our lives like full human beings is actively challenged. We are a group of people whose right to visibility in society is cheered against. For these reasons, we are exceptional, and for us it is not and cannot just be about a list of federal benefits or medical rights or powers of attorney, or employment protections. It is about full equality under the law and maximum possible equality in the eyes of our fellow man, and our access to civil marriage represents that like nothing else we could possibly be fighting for.


UPDATE:
Andrew Sullivan says it much shorter and sweeter than I do.