Gay-Marriage Adversary And Reporter Denied Access To President Barack Obama
LOS ANGELES – A female writer for the Georgia Informer – a newspaper which mostly targets African American and generally Black readers – was forcibly denied access to personally deliver a letter to President Barack Obama at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday 28 May, 2009.
Brenda Lee – as she is said to have identified herself – attempted on Thursday to approach President Barack Obama in order to hand over to him a letter that she had written and which she later explained was an expression of her discontent over the debate of gay marriage rights in the United States.
The Georgia small newspaper reporter, who works in Macon, Georgia, and serves as a “Roman Catholic priestess” – according to her – in the city of Anaheim, where she also resides, did not get the chance to get closer to the President, as she was carted off by Secret Service men approximately ten minutes before Obama's arrival on the ground.
It took two airport security officers to carry away by the arms and by the legs a kicking and screaming Brenda Lee from the press area near the Air Force One where Lee had wanted to submit her entreaty to the President, in a bid to persuade him “to take a stand for traditional marriage”.
Brenda Lee was released some time later after being interrogated.
She was also interviewed by the Associated Press following the incident.
Upon being refused by a Secret Service agent the right to give her letter to the President, Brenda Lee is cited to have told the man, “I'll take my chances if (the president) comes by here,” but then “he became annoyed that I wouldn't give him the letter,” Lee supposedly added.
Barack Obama was expected to arrive by helicopter at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) in order to board the Air Force One. The AP's Christina Hoag reports that the President had been in California's largest city with the purpose of attending “a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Beverly Hills on Wednesday.”
This new presidential development is the second Brenda Lee has covered.
No comment was made by any White House officials to either explain or justify what happened.
But this latest incident might appear to many as another indication of how seriously the issue of security around United States' first elected Black president is taken.