Alex, I don't think its style or even pettiness. Politicians are both careful and manipulative (Most are lawyers or even legal scholars like Clinton who knew exactly what he was doing with DADT and DOMA and Obama who knows exactly why we’ve been excised from his platform. Politicians usually have good reasons for what they do, and in this case its to pander to christian bigots.

If it were just pettiness it would come from someone like Leah Daughtry, an ordained pentescostal bigot and manager of the DNC. If you’ve read the articles in the Blade it's pretty clear that the DNC under her management is a hotbed of rightwing bigotry. She runs a DNC outfit called 'Faith in Action" which contributes DNC funds (including monies contributed by GLBT folks) to do outreach (read pandering) to rightwing christian bigots and opponents of choice for women.

According to the NY Times Daughtrty’s pet project the FIA “has also financed the faith outreach of state parties, sometimes in striking ways. In Alabama, the pro-life party chairman was given F.I.A. money to publish a ‘Faith and Values Voters Guide’ in local newspapers just before Election Day in 2006. The 12-page insert provided the religious narratives of statewide Democratic candidates – ‘I was richly blessed in my life with parents who raised me in a Christian home. . . .’- and concluded with a Democratic ‘covenant for the future.’ The covenant pledged to ‘require public schools to offer Bible literacy as part of their curriculum’ and made at least two vows that run counter to positions of the national party: to ‘pass a constitutional amendment confirming that all life is a gift from God and should be protected; and that life begins at conception’ and to ‘defeat any efforts to redefine marriage or provide the benefits of marriage to a same-sex union.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/magazine/20minister-t.html?_r=2&sq=leah%20daughtry&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
However the testimony from the GLBT discrimination trial against the Democrats reveals that it’s Obama who really calls the shots on these questions and that the DNC just does what they’re told.. And so does the platform committee. Dean says ‘They write the platform at the direction of the nominee.’. Obama authored the platform and it’s exclusion of even the terms gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual/transgendered. He’s afraid of being identified with us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvDiXrF2NpA&feature=related

Roberts, someday you're just going to have to take the trouble to sit down and learn about history. It’s not hard and it’s a critical tool for anyone who wants to be taken seriously.

If you even read newspapers you’d know that it was Clinton and his administration that first lied about Hussein-AL Qaeda and WMD's to support Clinton’s murderous policy that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children according to UN and food relief sources. Later, your Party’s accomplice in the murder of Iraqis, the Republicans, simply revived those lies after 9-11, supported by Senators Clinton, Biden and others. If you know about history you wouldn’t get exposed for not knowing things like that. You’d know that the Democrats and the Republicans both support the war.

(That is why you like Obama, isn’t it, Roberts? Because he’s going to extend the war and maybe expand it into Pakistan? You'd have really liked LBJ.)

If you knew any thing about politics you’d know that your Party's vice presidential candidate, Biden, campaigned for the 2005 Bankruptcy bill, the one that limits the right of working people to file for bankruptcy and eases the landlord’s ability to evict bankrupt tenants. Who but the most amateurish political thinker refuses to see the connection between Biden’s campaign for the credit card industry’s bankruptcy law and the fact that that same industry is centered in Delaware, Biden’s home state? See, education is important -it's much better than endlessy repeating spin. It’d might even help you see that both parties are against the interests of the working classes, but since you're supporting Obama (NAFTA) and Biden (bought and paid for by credit card comnpanies) you don't care.

Your Party's has been the leading party of homophobia for the last two years. And you're going to vote for them. Don't worry, the left will be around to clean up the mess you make.

Yeah. A "seat at the table for gays and lesbians." In spite of his great speech, he has constantly kept transgender people out of ENDA and refused to meet with trans people from his own state . . . until the past year. The first time he ever tried using the word "transgender" (3 years ago) he called us, "transgenerals." Hell, I was in the Navy, so I don't know if I want to be promoted if I end up in the Army. He maybe the hero of gays and lesbians, and may have been a champion of civil rights over the years, but he has a long way to go to be a hero for our community, assuming he lives long enough to learn.

Most of us left Camelot behind because we found out it was just another lie, an excuse for stalling on voting and housing rights bills and invasions of Cuba and Vietnam.

Some however, never grew up. They’re still enraptured by juvenile fantasies of rescue by a shining knight on a white horse. How awful for them.

“Perdue, I've forgotten more history than you'll ever learn or know.”

Apparently not, Roberts because you're still totally brain addled about politics and history.
You see. Roberts, it’s like this. You’re a Democrat snuggled up with Dean, Daughtry, Frank, Kennedy, Pelosi and Obama. They collectively oppose GLBT rights and proved it by discriminating against LGBT staff in the DNC, taking a hatchet to ENDA, pandering to bigots (that’s the entirety of Obama’s, Frank’s and Daughtry’s strategy), ditching the hate crimes bill, refusing to repeal DADT and DOMA and importuning pulpit pimps with ‘faith based’ ‘charitable contributions’. And you support them because you suppress all that history.

Beyond that, you actually shill for them, Robert’s. Aren’t you one of those people who defend Obama’s pandering to christists? Don’t you say that not all evangelical christers are bigots? (Actually you have a point. I’m told by usually reliable sources that 231 evangelist christers, spread out over 36 states, are in fact not anti-GLBT bigots. I can even get you a list of their names - it only takes a page or two.) But most of them are bigots and Obama’s going after them and winning their votes using revival meetings and excising the names GLBT from the platform.

You’d think that the platform committee would have to have one or two people with backbones. Apparently they're as spineless as the Republicans who walked and talked the bigot line to get elected. If you knew the history of the Republicans you’d fight what’s happening in your Party tooth and nail instead of embracing it. But you don't know history.

Sooner or later events like the ongoing war, economic crumpling and rampaging christian bigotry, which you and your party support, will inevitably lead millions more GLBT folks, opponents of imperial wars and working people and others to turn against your and your Republican accomplices. Just like the generations of 1776 turned on the Tories and the generation of 1860 turned on the slavers.

For socialists like me that’s going to be great fun, and in fact it’s already started. That’s why people like you and your Republican partners in crime get so panicked. You should be.