While I can easily understand the disappointment of the LGBT community, even their anger, I do feel President Obama has stepped out fairly boldly, even if in the limited context of his personal view.

I encourage those in the LGBT community (and their supporters from the heterosexual one) to view this as a “glass half-full” statement by the President rather than a “glass half-empty” one.

Let me use an example that has nothing to do with legal and human rights, human dignity, etc. to try to illustrate what I mean.

When President Obama cancelled the President Bush-era “back-to-the-Moon” project, as a huge supporter of our space program since I was a kid back in the 1950’s, I was terribly disappointed, though I understood, and agreed with, his reasons.

I fervently hoped he would step boldly forward with his own proposal that echoed the Age of Apollo, when we went from having sent NO human into space to landing two men on the Moon in a little over eight years (counting from President Kennedy’s call to the first Moon landing).

Then he came along and proposed . . . we go back to the Moon by around 2035. Gee whiz. About three times as long to REPEAT something as we took to achieve it the FIRST time—what a thrill.

But it sure as hell beat nothing, and I’m hopeful that he can be persuaded to speed up the timetable as circumstances permit (assuming he wins re-election) and that his successor(s) will, getting us back by, say, 2018-2019. *Surely* to every god there is we can do at least THAT much. (If we still can’t afford it then, well, I guess we’re dead in the water anyway, on every front.)

The political realities are that American voters hold about evenly divided—in some polls, exactly evenly so—views about same-sex marriage. So, yes, half of them support it—but half of them don’t.

Since California looms so large in our national civic discourse, I urge the LGBT folks to redouble their efforts there then keep redoubling them right up to Election Day in support of the proposal for a state constitutional amendment granting same-sex couples equal rights. If North Carolina can pass—overwhelmingly—a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, then another state sure as hell can do the opposite, if a majority of the voters approve it.

Key groups on which to focus? Two spring to mind.

First, those Democrats who are going to vote Democrat anyway but who either oppose or are unsure about same-sex marriage. I imagine this will be an easier group to convince than the second one, though by how much, I have no idea.

Second, those Independents who are probably going to support Democrats but who also, like the Democrats above, remain opposed to or unsure about the question, plus Independents who are undecided across the board—and who are key in most (all?) elections.

Forget the gay-bashers whose idea of a fun Saturday night is to shadow an LBGT person into some dark, isolated place then jump him (almost certainly a man, not a woman). And yes, I knew such people growing up in rural Texas, sorry to say. Forget the people who hate President Obama so much that they’ll oppose ANYTHING he supports, even in his lukewarm way in this case. Forget the folks in the Tea Party, along with their wing of the GOP. In fact, you can essentially write off the GOP, period, given the fatally toxic attitudes to which it is so proudly home.

And hold on to the fact that “politics is the art of the possible—not the perfect.”