Genie - In regards to what you said in your last post...

Yes, that is probably right what you said.

But my point is that if Obama was openly revealed in fact to BE gay, then the people who already don't like him would have a lot more ammunition to raise a ruckus about it, wouldn't they? And that would strengthen the opposition to Obama to the point that it would make his job tremendously more difficult than it is now.

The American president serves, psychologically speaking, as a surrogate parent figure in the subconscious of most of the American public, whether or not they know it or not. That's why they have so often tended to vote for someone who resembles the strong father figures immortalized in a couple of hundred years of American popular fiction, history, and movies....

Think John Wayne, Lorne Greene, Ronald Reagan, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, John Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, Clint Eastwood, U.S. Grant, etc...what the American public really wants when they think of their president is a great big and kind but strong and authoritative "Daddy" in the White House whom they can trust to lead the national family and get tough when the going gets tough. Or they might sometime settle for a tough but fair "Mommy" in the White House (like Hillary or Sarah, depending on your partisan viewpoint)...it's a possibility, given certain conditions. What they absolutely don't want is a "wimp" (male or female) who doesn't get tough when the going gets tough. Some who have suffered the "wimp" label either in or out of office are Jimmy Carter, George Bush Senior, Michael Dukakis, and Adlai Stevenson...and there are few things more devastating in American politics than being labelled a "wimp". Being stupid is acceptable. Being a "wimp" is not! ;-)

Now.......it shouldn't stretch your mind too much to recognize that the average American does not picture the nation's surrogate Father figure as a gay man. And I'll tell you why...because about 99% of all the people living in the USA have grown up in a heterosexual family with a father who obviously wasn't a gay man. That's a fact. And what do they subconsciously want for their president? They want someone who makes them feel safe and who reminds them somehow of their own idealized familial origins...which were not gay.

Period.

This does not mean those people necessarily hate gays (though some of them certainly do)...it means they are more comfortable with the familiar than they are with the unfamiliar. Period.

For the same reason, they were reluctant to vote a Catholic into office until finally they did with John Kennedy. Why were they reluctant to do so? Well, it hadn't been done before, that's why. It's always quite hard to get people to shift from the culturally familiar to the culturally unfamiliar....whether it be electing a Catholic president or a female president or a non-White president or a gay president...or giving women and Black and Indians the vote.    And the more culturally unfamiliar the scenario is, the longer are the chances against it happening...because people are creatures of habit, and they fear the unfamiliar. The only time they'll opt for a radical change in the familiar is when they have become deeply disillusioned and let down with the normal status quo. That's what happened in 2008 after 8 dreadful years of George Bush, when America voted in "a Black man" (actually he's half Black and half White...but in America half-Black means only one thing in practical terms: it means ALL Black.) That is not so in some other societies, but it clearly is in the USA.