Argument

[ayrrie]

My dad and I had an interesting conversation at the dinner table last night. We were debating minorities as US Presidents, and my dad was saying that since Obama's probably not going to get re-elected, we won't have another President who 'deviates from the mainstream' for a while (read: someone who isn't a white, heterosexual male). This is

Comments

[maga_culinae]

A woman or different racial minority (that's not Hispanic or Arabic) is much more likely than any other, especially moreso than a homosexual or transgendered president.

[itches]

'disabled'

Haven't you already had one of those?

[ayrrie]

Derp yes, and I'd meant to take that out. In any case, I seem to recall that FDR tried to act as close to 'normal' as he could...I'm thinking someone openly disabled who doesn't try to hide it.

[itches]

There's a joke in that last comment about some of your more recent presidents.

[ayrrie]

True, I guess you could say Bush qualifies...:P

[parallax_view]

I think we'll get a Mrs. President before anything else. Hilary came pretty close, closer than any female has gotten. If it wasn't for Obama's charisma I think she might have had better than 50/50 chances. It just feels like the country is becoming more and more open to that, to me.

As for a gay president, I'm really not sure. I'd love to see it happen before I die, but I dunno. We have alot of women, minority, minority women, disabled and other combinations of people in public office. Yet there is still nauseatingly widespread closed mindedness towards homosexuality among people who are female, black, hispanic, asian, disabled, etc. I mean, we're still fighting over a homosexual person's right to marry, we're so behind on the issue.

I have a nagging suspicion that, save for a crisis in which one gay man or woman emerges who has the answer, all of the other categories you named will have a representative as President before we have a gay President.

That makes me fairly sad to think about.

[parallax_view]

Whoops, you're right, I totally forgot about FDR. I guess that crosses disabled off the list.

Mentioning marriage in the other post got me thinking. So far we've only had one President who wasn't married - James Buchanan. But that was way back in the 1800s and it seems to be a fluke, because every President before and after him has been married, iirc. I wonder when our next single President will be, and if that person will also be a woman, gay, of a minority, etc.

[anonymous]

eh, assuming 10% of the population is gay, that you have an average of 10 presidents over 70 years assuming that only very bad presidents lose their second term, and assuming the population is perfectly non-biased re: sexuality, you have a 65% chance of scoring gays within your lifetime. On a 4% of the population being gay, chance drops to 33%.

Given that much of the population is still poorly-educated and conservative, however, the chances are probably much lower than that so that the pool of openly-gay politicians would be much more limited than merely assuming that the population group politicians follows the distribution frequency of the general population.