By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 12 years ago

Where do 2012 Presidential candidates stand on LGBT issues?

Ned Flaherty at Marriage Equality USA has compiled this handy dandy chart showing where each of the twelve confirmed 2012 Presidential candidates, plus President Obama, stand on LGBT rights. Flaherty has examined the candidates’ stances on marriage rights, DOMA, adoption, and open military service, as well as several other issues, and here’s what it comes down to:

13 politicians, 12 issues, and only 1 perfect scorecard.

That perfect scorecard belongs to the only openly gay candidate in the field, Republican Fred Karger who, barring a fluke dipped in serendipity and wrapped in a miracle, hasn’t a chance in hell at being the nominee.

Note that all the people who were present in Ames, Iowa this weekend to participating the Iowa straw poll, only one person, Jon Huntsman, is in favor of civil unions for same sex couples. Between them, the three widely acknowledged leaders in the race for the GOP nomination – that’s Bachmann, Perry and Romney – have an astonishing number of red “no” squares to their names. As much as those yellow “maybe”s next to Obama’s names piss me off, it’s clear that when it comes to these issues, which will impact the lives of an estimated 31 million LGBT voters, he’s the best candidate we’ve got right now.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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