Backlash For Debaters at heckling Gay Soldier
By Luca Di Leo
President Barack Obama chastised Republicans for keeping quiet when members of a GOP presidential debate audience booed a gay soldier, and one of the Republican candidates,Herman Cain, conceded Sunday it would have been “appropriate” to have responded to the crowd.
Reverberations from the Sept. 22 Republican debate in Orlando, Fla. continued throughout the weekend.
Mr. Obama, addressing the nation’s largest gay lobby group at a dinner Saturday, admonished the Republican slate for letting the behavior by members of the debate audience go unanswered.
Being commander-in-chief means defending those in uniform, “even when it’s not politically convenient,” Mr. Obama said in the speech in Washington before the Human Rights Campaign.
“We don’t believe in standing silent when that happens,” the president said.
Mr. Cain, pressed on the issue during an appearance Sunday on the ABC program “This Week,” at first said that, in the heat of the debate, it was difficult to determine why the audience is booing. He added: “I was not in control. I was not the moderator.”
Eventually, he acknowledged that, “in retrospect,” it would have been right to say something.
During the debate, broadcast on Fox News, members of the crowd booed, some loudly, afterStephen Hill, a U.S. soldier in Iraq, asked via video conference about the repeal of the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” law. Later, they cheered when candidate Rick Santorum said he opposed lifting the ban.
Although not a front-runner in the Republican nomination battle, Mr. Cain has seen a surge of support in recent polls
Mr. Obama, while extolling the repeal of the repeal the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers during his Saturday speech, stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriages. The president has said that his views on the matter are still “evolving.”
Mr. Obama has been looking for ways to rally his liberal base of support amid polls showing that Americans are dissatisfied with his stewardship of the economy.
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