Barack Obama still docked his chair at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in 2015 when the Supreme Court — then with a different conservative/liberal balance — recognized the right to marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges.
In a recent social media post, Obama remembers that June day, recalling at the time how he cautioned that “progress often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back.”
That kind of progress describes a decent situation, not ideal but tolerable, as long as the progress persists. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encapsulated this incremental march towards equality with his hopeful assertion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Those eager for justice and change must be resolute, in other words, as the famous desk reminds.
But there are other occasions, as Obama notes citing the federal government’s codifying marriage equality by passing the Respect for Marriage Act, “when slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”
A student and product of the Civil Rights movement, especially as practiced in America in the 1960s, Obama is deeply familiar about “progress in small increments.” And he is uniquely positioned to recognize the bolt of thunder he describes, since for many who walked (and still walk) the long march of Civil Rights toward racial justice, Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 was such a thunderbolt compared to the slow, steady effort that progress more often looks like.
Obama calls the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act “a landmark moment in the fight for equality, and a tribute to the generations of Americans – sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends – whose example and advocacy have done more than any law to change hearts and minds.”
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