State Of The Union

     In the wake of a Republican takeover of Congress and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, domestic politics have been far too depressing to bother subjecting myself to the impotent words of a great president beholden to the oversight of bigots, sociopaths, and the functionally illiterate. But were I compelled (and I am) to choke down yet another helping of bitter disappointment with a side of bile and research the recent State of The Union Address, what I would want to know is if President Obama has persevered in his commitment to more or less ignoring the LGBT voters who helped to elect him--with gay teen suicide garnering international media attention and civil rights flagrantly denied to a sizable segment of the American populace, did he even bother to mention us?  A question not so much formulated as preexisting and omnipresent.

     In most research situations, my first instinct is to defer all quandaries to the Mystic Oracle of the West (more commonly known as Google), but as the State of The Union Address is a ubiquitously televised event and seeing is believing, in this case I'll skip straight to Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/) and watch the thing.

     Eureka! The first hit on Youtube for search query "State of The Union Address 2011" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZdEmjtF6HE) was posted by the White House on the Obama administration's own official channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse) as ascertained by clicking the publisher's link just below the video thumbnail in the list of search results--I'm going to consider this source reliable on the basis that the administration, having written, produced, directed, filmed, and released the address, could have falsified it before the fact much more effectively than after.     
                 
     The exercise yielded this result:  Yes, the president mentioned the LGBT community once, solely in context of the repeal of DADT, in the last ten minutes of the address, for about five seconds of an hour-long speech. 
     Admittedly, it was worth the whole thing to see the relative absence of applause and the looks on congressional faces when President Obama said: "We simply can't afford a permanent extension of our tax cuts to the wealthiest 2% of Americans."  This is the sort of comedy one can't script, it has to emerge naturally from the overall distance from reality that can only be achieved by placing a hundred multimillionaires in the same room with one another.    

      There are those who would suggest that an hour is an excessive amount of time to devote to one small question, and that the pertinent information could have been more expeditiously unearthed elsewhere, but I strongly advocate a more holistic approach to research.  A snippet of information taken out of context with the whole that originated it can often be misleading, information from a secondary source is only as accurate as the fact-checkers and political leanings of the entity that publishes it, and in watching the address in its entirety, I have been enriched with knowledge outside of the specific topic at hand, knowledge which may come in very handy when I have another paper to write, when my oldest daughter asks me about the future of clean renewable energy, or when I'm simply trying to gain a better understanding of the world around me.