Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean O'Leary

It’s the double hit of “appalled and shocked” that tells you what Jean O’Leary is really doing here: not just registering disagreement, but indicting a breach of political decorum. The State of the Union is supposed to be civic theater about national priorities; O’Leary frames Bush’s move as a misuse of the stage itself, a bait-and-switch where a ritual of collective purpose becomes a platform for targeting a minority.

The phrasing is precise about power. “Used” implies instrumentalization: same-sex couples aren’t being debated as citizens with claims, but deployed as a tool in a larger strategy. “Attack” escalates the stakes beyond policy; it paints the rhetoric as aggressive, punitive, designed to wound and rally. Then comes the most chilling phrase in the sentence: “constitutional amendment.” O’Leary is flagging the difference between ordinary political skirmishing and hard-wiring exclusion into the country’s highest legal text. That’s not culture war noise; it’s an attempt to make discrimination structurally durable, to foreclose future arguments by preemptively rewriting the rules of the game.

Context matters: early 2000s fights over marriage equality were often less about marriage than about mobilizing anxieties in an election-era landscape. O’Leary, a veteran of gay liberation and rights work, hears the tactic plainly: elevate a moral panic to presidential rhetoric, then launder it through constitutional language so it looks principled instead of partisan. Her outrage is strategic, too. By naming the venue and the mechanism, she’s warning that the threat isn’t only what was said, but how easily the machinery of mainstream politics can be turned against a vulnerable group.