Yesterday, in a meeting with liberal bloggers, President Barack Obama said his position on same-sex marriage was "evolving." Kerry Eleveld reports:
“I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” he said. “But I also think you're right that attitudes evolve, including mine. And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships. I have staff members who are in committed, monogamous relationships, who are raising children, who are wonderful parents. And I care about them deeply. And so while I'm not prepared to reverse myself here, sitting in the Roosevelt Room at 3:30 in the afternoon, I think it's fair to say that it's something that I think a lot about. That's probably the best you'll do out of me today."
If Obama began to openly support marriage equality, that wouldn't just be an "evolution" of his views; it would be a return to where they once were. After all, in 1996, while running for the Illinois Senate, he said he supported marriage equality. In response to a newspaper questionnaire, he wrote, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."
As we all know, the Illinois state Senate candidate who once supported marriage equality ultimately ran for president in a country in which a majority of citizens did not support same-sex marriage, and his administration has defended in court laws that do just that. Polls are now beginning to show a majority of Americans favoring marriage equality, and you can sense a palpable relief in the president's statement that someday soon, he'll be able to stop pretending that his religious beliefs demand that he oppose equal rights for gay and lesbian couples. The subtext of what the president said yesterday was not that his position on same-sex marriage has "evolved" but rather that he supports it, he has always supported it, and someday, he'll find the political courage to do so openly.
The president's deliberate, even transparent charade on same-sex marriage is symbolic of the president's first two years in office, where substantive legislative accomplishments have gone hand in hand with cowardly rhetorical concessions to conservative arguments he cannot possibly believe. The spectacle of the president pretending to be opposed to marriage equality while quietly signaling that he is eager for the moment when he can openly support it is, to borrow from his interview with Jon Stewart yesterday, pretty much the opposite of audacity.
