@ President Obama: Please stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act

We Floridians are having one of those classic sticky-toffee summers, you know, the body-baking, inertia-promoting kind that predispose you to being in a bad mood, often before the day has even got off the ground.

It's not that. The normally all-affecting weather is irrelevant.

Nor is it the fault of Messrs. Worry and Fear; although I know them well (and who wouldn't, given how incessantly, how intrusively, they've been hanging around these days). Nor is boredom to blame, although that too, especially when I see someone engage in the same reprehensible behavior over and over, and especially, especially when that someone is not a child, but rather, an adult whom I'd previously admired; a leader, shall we say. At such times, as now, what I tend to feel is an oddly combustible combination of boredom and frustration, the results of which might best be described as fury, if that makes sense.

Right now, I am furious that in 2009, there are still some Americans who do not have equal rights, neither in reality nor even scrawled somewhere within the laundry list of moral abstractions that is the law. And I'm furious that the very presidential candidate who in February 2008 said this:

"Now I’m a Christian, and I praise Jesus every Sunday," he said, to a sudden wave of noisy applause and cheers.

"I hear people saying things that I don’t think are very Christian with respect to people who are gay and lesbian," he said, and the crowd seemed to come along with him this time.

...and who went on to become the first African-American to be elected president, igniting a breathtaking cosmic lightshow of a win for civil rights in America, has now, for reasons I cannot fathom, defended the loathsome Defense of Marriage Act in a brief filed by the DOJ, the logic of which was flawed; the language, utterly offensive.

From Credo, who will present a petition (goal: 30,000 singers, and they're already 70% of the way there) to the White House:

President Obama and Attorney General Holder cannot stand behind a brief which, per the New York Times, "cites decades-old cases ruling that states do not have to recognize marriages between cousins or an uncle and a niece."

Sign this petition today to ask President Obama and Attorney General Holder to withdraw this brief and apologize for its contents. We expect better from this administration than to compare same-sex marriage to incest.

Please do sign it, dear readers. It's but one thing, but it's something.

Also at litbrit.