Obama: The first gay president?

So says religious-right pundit Matt Barber in WingNut WorldNet Daily: “If Bill Clinton was the first black president, Barack Obama, if elected, will be the first “gay” president. No, I don’t mean he’ll personally decorate the West Wing, open a bathhouse in the Rose Garden or take up with Barney Frank. I mean he’ll be the most radically pro-homosexual, anti-family president in history.”

This will be news to the legions who heard Obama say that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” that civil unions confer equality, and that he’d seek Pentagon “consensus” before dismantling “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I’m for Obama, don’t get me wrong, but the change he offers gays is incremental.

It wouldn’t be Matt Barber, though, if he only offended one group. Matt goes to town on Obama’s biraciality, saying his “worldview (is) marbled throughout in murky tones” and needs the “penicillin” of anti-gay legislation. What do gays and Obama have in common? Oh, Matt, I get it! They’re both dirty!

On the other hand, maybe there’s an accidental truth to it that Barber doesn’t even get. When Toni Morrison wrote her “Clinton-is-black” piece in the New Yorker, she referred to the overscrutiny Clinton was in for as a “poor, working-class . . . junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas” who embodied “every trope of blackness” in America. Aren’t gays in public life overscrutinized in the same way? Sen. Larry Craig is urged to step down over his sex woes, but Sen. David Vitter sits pretty, diapers and all. And Charles O’Byrne just quit as N.Y. Gov. David Paterson’s second-in-command over his back-tax troubles, even though he paid in full long before the N.Y. papers got wind of the story. What do you think?