President Obama Announces Support for Gay Marriage

[Al B. Sure!]

Obama's support for gay marriage (1996)
Obama's opposition to gay marriage (2003-2012)
Obama's support for gay marriage (2012- )

[kentonio]

I don't remember him opposing it, just dithering on it.

[Dinner]

I hate to say it (I agree with same sex marriage), but for those who rail against Romney for being a flip flopper, Obama is no better on this issue. Spare me this "evolving on the issue" stuff. There is a quote from 1996, where Obama says he's for same sex marriage. His views "devolved" when he was running for state Senate and continued to 2008 when he was against it. And then when public opinion shifted the other way...

Though it is a good thing that he finally declares for it, seeing as how that appeared to be his position since 1996, but decided to lie about it for political purposes (how is this different from Romney now?)

Yeah, I think the blatant political calculations on this topic just became too much for everyone. Everyone knew he supported it (as you pointed out he publicly said he supported it in the past) but his advisers didn't want him repeating it now as it might upset rednecks in swing states. The problem is what he was doing was perfectly obvious to everyone so he wasn't fooling the red necks but he was pissing off the liberals so at this point the man really doesn't have anything to lose by coming clean.

[Al B. Sure!]

I don't remember him opposing it, just dithering on it.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/12424857-418/barack-obamas-ever-evolving-views-on-gay-marriage.html

[Tupac Shakur]

[DaShi]

I hear that Romney's looking to having Biden be his VP as well.

[Tupac Shakur]

Joe Biden just might go down in history as the guy who forced Barack Obama to publicly announce his private support for gay marriage.

But the vice president is no hero in the West Wing, and administration officials are struggling to cast Obama’s truly historic — and risky — announcement as something more than an election-year shotgun wedding.

Obama’s interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts capped a frenetic half-week of backstage political maneuvering after Biden said he was “comfortable” with gay marriage during a TV interview that was pre-taped Friday and aired Sunday. It followed the passage Tuesday of an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative in North Carolina that illustrated the divisions in typically cohesive Obama constituencies, including women, Hispanics and blacks. And it exposed a few divisions in the Obama-Biden camp.

Senior administration officials admit that Biden’s comment was, indeed, the catalyst for Obama to make his historic announcement weeks earlier than planned.

But Biden’s remarks deeply annoyed Obama’s team, people close to the situation tell POLITICO, because it aggrandized his role at the expense of Obama’s yeoman efforts on behalf of the community and pushed up the timing of a sensitive announcement they had hoped to break — at a time and place of their own choosing — in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this fall.

Biden blamed; politics drove timing

Follow the link for more Biden bashing from Obama's team.

[MrFun]

Ya'll are ignoring the important issue here: what are Biden's chances of being on the ticket again after forcing Obama to make this announcement? I imagine they're not good; Obama can't be happy about Joe's big mouth potentially jeopardizing his re-election.

I've thought about this too. I wonder if behind the curtains, Obama is angry with Biden.

But, this may not necessarily cost Obama votes. It could actually help him gain votes, considering that more than half of Americans support gay marriage. But, it could go the other way, and he could lose votes - who knows.

[giblets]

The fact that the vice president can actually exert some influence is just further proof that Obama is a wimp.

[MrFun]

hey now

[MrFun]

Here is an article whose writer is much more critical about Obama's announcement.

Barack Obama’s Bull**** Gay Marriage Announcement
ABC News has only released one brief clip of Obama's conversation about gay marriage today, but it seems fairly clear from the network's coverage that his announcement amounts to much less than meets the eye. He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn't believe they have a right to do so. This is like saying that black children and white children ought to attend the same schools, but if the people of Alabama reject that notion—what are you gonna do?
The key language in the ABC News write-up is this:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.

On this afternoon's special broadcast, Jake Tapper echoed that point: "The president said he thought this was a state-by-state issue."

Well, before Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state issue, too. So was slavery. There are 44 states in which gay men and women are currently barred from marrying one another. Obama's position is that, while he would have voted the other way, those 44 states are perfectly within their rights to arbitrarily restrict the access of certain individuals to marriage rights based solely on their sexual orientation.

That is a half-assed, cowardly cop-out. There are currently at least three cases winding their way toward federal courts that address the issue of whether (among other things) the equal protection clause of the constitution guarantees gay men and women the same access to marriage rights as heterosexual men and women—the Proposition 8 case, in which David Boies and Ted Olson challenged California's ban on gay marriage, and several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay men and woman from receiving federal marriage benefits and allows states to refuse to recognize valid gay marriages. Obama's Justice Department has admirably declined to defend the constitutionality of DOMA. But the position he enunciated today is in opposition to Boies and Olson: Obama is saying that if he were a judge, he would have rejected Boies and Olson's constitutional arguments and affirmed the right of Californians to enshrine bigotry in their state constitution.

Equality is not a state-by-state issue. There is no reason other than ignorance and hatred that two men can get married in New York and not North Carolina. At a time when vindictive hucksters are rolling out anti-gay marriage amendments across the nation, and when conflicting state and federal laws portend an insoluble morass of divorce, custody, and estate issues, and when gay Americans are turning to the U.S. Constitution and the courts to seek an affirmation of their humanity, "it's a state-by-state issue" is a shameful dodge.

Is it a politically wise dodge? Maybe. This was obviously a hastily arranged interview—we're told that ABC News' Robin Roberts, who is close to Michelle Obama, was only tapped in the last 48 hours by the White House to come down—designed to clean up the mess left by Biden's pro-gay marriage comments in as advantageous way as possible. And for Obama to declare that he considers North Carolina and other states' bans on gay marriage to be unconstitutional would probably energize the GOP base. But those bans are unconstitutional. And anyone who supports their legitimacy—as Obama just did, in no uncertain terms—even if they oppose the policy, is adopting the retrograde position in the contemporary gay marriage debate. Obama is moving backward, not forward.

Contact John Cook:

[Jon Miller]

I don't believe that gays have the right to marry.

I think that position is terrible, and would be a terrible direction for the nation to take.

I do think that gays should marry, and so I support gay marriage.

(on this subject) Obama!

JM

[Dauphin]

I've thought about this too. I wonder if behind the curtains, Obama is angry with Biden.

But, this may not necessarily cost Obama votes. It could actually help him gain votes, considering that more than half of Americans support gay marriage. But, it could go the other way, and he could lose votes - who knows.

If over half of Americans support gay marriage, why is it barred in 44 states*? It appears that people who wanted to ban gay marriage got into office just fine (and then some) with that minority position - or those who wanted to allow gay marriage haven't made it a central campaign promise - will people really change their vote based on an issue they don't seem to care that much about? Those who care most seem to be against the idea.

*from your quoted article, not sure if that means a law was passed to ban it, or no law passed to allow it.

Edit - and 44 doesn't appear to be the reflective figure, according to Wiki.

[Jaguar]

Occasionally there are issues where opinion polling consistently lines up differently than actual voting does. Rick Santorum typically overperformed his polling, and gay marriage bans do as well. Social conservatives are not very forthcoming to pollsters, apparently.

[Dauphin]

Voting Tory is like that too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor