For the first year ever, the annual White House Easter Egg Roll tickets were dispersed via the Internet, as opposed to an in-person, first-come, first-served basis that the White House has used for years for the general public. This year the Obama White House tried out another first: setting aside a few tickets for same-sex marriage activists.
Washington Times correspondent Christina Bellantoni reported the story last Wednesday:
President Obama's White House saved Easter Egg Roll tickets for gay and lesbian parents, reaching out to groups that felt ostracized by previous administrations.
The White House would not say how many tickets were set aside for the group for Monday's annual celebration, only noting that it was far fewer than the large block set aside for military families and the 2,000 saved for D.C. public schools. There also is a batch for administration employees and their children.
The White House Office of Public Liaison coordinated with several groups representing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues and saved a group of tickets for those families.
Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, said 10 families from her group will attend the egg roll, thanks to the new White House policy.
So the Obama White House took the occasion of the annual Easter Egg Roll to curry favor with a left-wing political interest group. The Obama administration is literally using children of gay and lesbian couples as pawns for political purposes.
But aside from the Washington Times, it seems the mainstream print media are ignoring the story. A search of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and USA Today in Nexis from January 1 through April 13 shows only one obscure mention from an April 12 New York Times story about a possibly homosexual contestant on "American Idol":
Even the White House made a point of inviting lesbian and gay families to join in an annual Easter Egg Roll.
Thus it seems plausible that a person with more than a toe peeking out of the closet might actually win the most hotly contested singing show on the planet. True, it took six years of public insinuation before Clay Aiken, the popular also-ran from Season 2, made the choice in 2008 to come out. When he did so, however, the anticipated career-stall never happened. The news was greeted with a collective yawn.
A Nexis search of the past four months likewise found no mentions of the ticket set-asides, and a review by Media Research Center analysts of the April 13 editions of NBC's "Today", CBS's "The Early Show" and ABC's "Good Morning America" likewise found no mention of the ticket set-aside.
