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Obama becomes the first President to call for equality for the gay community during Inauguration and remembers Stonewall along other civil rights moments.
Photo from Getty Images
President Barack Obama gave a moving Inaugural Address today after being sworn into his second term in front of an estimated 800,000. As the first President to come out with support for marriage equality, he is also the first to mention the gay community and call for our equal rights during a Presidential Inauguration:
"It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law - for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well."
Prior to this portion of his speech, Obama also remembered the Stonewall Riots as moment in civil rights history when mentioning it along the Selma Marches and the Seneca Falls Convention:
"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths - that all of us are created equal - is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."
View the full Inaugural Address below or read here:
