Donald Trump has announced the sale of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Casino magnate wife Miriam Adelson who has done NOTHING to receive it will pick up her purchase at a ceremony..
Via the AP.
President Donald Trump has announced his first recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and they include the wife of a major Republican Party donor, the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth. Trump will also posthumously recognize the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Medals are going to Miriam Adelson, a doctor and wife of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a Republican donor; Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who is retiring after more than 41 years in the U.S. Senate; former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and Alan Page, who began a legal career after leaving the NFL.
Potential recipients of next years award include: Vladie Putin, A. Hitler, Darth Vader, Benedict Arnold, Satan, and Space Ghost.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama named thirteen recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom is the Nation’s highest civilian honor given to individuals who have made great contributions to the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
This years recipients included Madeleine Albright, John Doar, Bob Dylan, John Glenn, John Paul Stevens, and Dolores Huerta among others.But conspicuously absent from this years awards was a posthumous to LGBT Civil Rights hero Frank Kameny who passed away earlier this year.
Frank Kameny, along with Harvey Milk is “one of the most significant figures’ in the American LGBT civil rights movement history. In 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the Army Map Service in Washington, D.C. because of his homosexuality, leading him to begin “a Herculean struggle with the American establishment” that would “spearhead a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s”. Kameny later went on to co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, became the first openly gay candidate for the United States Congress in 1973, and stayed actively involved and at the forefront of the LGBT civil rights movement until his death last year on October 11, 2011 at age 86.
In death, I thought gay pioneer Frank Kameny would be palatable to President Obama when deciding this year’s Medal of Freedom recipients. Well, our Less-than-Fierce Advocate-in-Chief announced the latest batch of awardees yesterday and Kameny’s name was omitted.
My thinking was that the White House would not risk giving this gay icon the award while he was alive, because he might go off-script at the reception and ceremony for the honorees and say something to anger the administration, but once he had passed on Obama would give him this award. I was wrong.
Our lame Democratic Party gay leadership at the Human Rights Campaign issued a release lauding Obama choosing longtime gay ally and labor advocate Dolores Huerta as a recipient, and failed to express disappointment that Kameny was not posthumously selected along with Huerta. Foolish of me to even think HRC could praise the president, salute Huerta and advocate for Kameny getting the Medal of Freedom if Obama is reelected.
Not only is it a shame Obama didn’t award Kameny the Medal of Freedom in 2012, it’s equally troubling that HRC and AFER expended no energy and resources fiercely advocating on Kameny’s behalf.
Kameny and his legacy more than deserve to be recognized and included in Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients.
But it seems that in an election year not only is it to risky to sign an executive order against LGBT discrimination in the workplace. But its even too “controversial” to award one of the most prolific LGBT rights pioneers this country has even seen a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
