Obama Speaks To Wealthy Gays

Last night President Obama spoke a small audience of wealthy LGBT Democrats, raising over $1.4M at the $38K per person event at the DC home of a married lesbian couple. An excerpt from his speech:

The work that we've done with respect to the LGBT community I think is just profoundly American and is at the heart of who we are. (Applause.) And that’s why I could not be prouder of the track record that we've done, starting with the very beginning when we started to change, through executive order, some of the federal policies. Kathleen -- the work that she did making sure that hospital visitation was applied equally to same-sex couples, just like with anybody else's loved ones. The changes we made at the State Department. The changes we made in terms of our own personnel policies. But also some very high-profile work, like "don't ask, don't tell."

And what's been striking over the course of these last three years is because we've rooted this work in this concept of fairness, and we haven't gone out of our way to grab credit for it, we haven't gone out of our way to call other folks names if they didn’t always agree with us on stuff, but we just kept plodding along -- because of that, in some ways what's been remarkable is how readily the public recognizes this is the right thing to do.

Over at Metro Weekly, reporter Chris Geidner has quotes from the attendees, which included such high-powered gay names as Tim Gill and James Hormel.