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More — Reports, at Least — From the White House Q-and-A

By on July 2, 2010

There was much more — at least, in the way of reporting — from the Thursday, July 1, meeting between White House Domestic Policy Adviser Melody Barnes and nine representatives from the LGBT media, including Metro Weekly.

My second report — “The Constitutional Question” — looks at discussion of the White House and President Obama’s position on the Defense of Marriage Act:

The journalists at the meeting raised the issue at several points throughout the briefing, finally zeroing in on a fairly nuanced, but important, question of whether the administration regards the law as merely discriminatory, or whether it finds it to be unconstitutional.

Other reports from the meeting included Pam’s House Blend’s Pam Spaulding, who noted:

Short version: Nothing new was learned, despite numerous attempts to get substantive answers about administration policy; move along to the next PHB post.

The Advocate‘s Kerry Eleveld summarized several of the questions and answers here, focusing in on the lack of movement on the marriage front. Finally, for now, Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog wrote of one interesting note that came up near the end of the meeting:

And, you’ll want to know that while there isn’t a high ranking LGBT official in the White House, there are a number of high ranking administration officials to whom LGBT issues are very important. Among those high ranking officials identified by Barnes are [Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and [Deputy Chief of Staff] Jim Messina. Yes, we’re in good hands.

The other two she named were Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett and herself.

The first Metro Weekly Poliglot report on the meeting can be found here.

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