By Steve Rhodes
Not everyone is impressed by Barack Obama’s sudden conversion to the cause of gay marriage. Progress? Undoubtedly. But pay closer attention, please. The man just endorsed North Carolina’s right to do what it just did.
You have to hand it to Obama: He runs mean game.
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“I’m evolving,” Carol Marin wrote for the Sun-Times on Tuesday.
“Just like President Obama. Except my evolution is from mild irritation to outright disbelief when it comes to Obama’s declarations – or lack thereof – on gay marriage.”
Marin, unfortunately, has been overtaken by events. But her point explains why so many of us who have always supported gay marriage find it hard to join Obamaphiles returning to their Kool-Aid: It’s hard to be inspired by a liar.
“I don’t for a moment believe that Barack Obama . . . is still struggling with his view on the rightness or the fairness of men marrying the men they love or women marrying women who are their soul mates,” Marin wrote.
If he was ever struggling at all. The fact that we don’t know colors any evaluation of the man’s character.
And to those who say it doesn’t matter how he got to his current position, consider that he has finally come around to Dick Cheney’s thinking circa 2004 – in other words, the status quo.
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Given the fact that Obama has now merely stated a shift in his personal opinion without proposing a change in the law, the only story is . . . Obama’s personal view. It’s all about him, as usual.
But is any view Obama puts forth on gay marriage believable at this juncture?
His history of disingenuous squishiness on the issue is well-known by now – that’s why hidden among the stories glorifying The Leader, as ace analyst Glenn Greenwald often puts it, are stories such as David Plotz’s in Slate asking in its headline “Do You Believe Obama Actually Changed His Mind On Gay Marriage?”
Plotz doesn’t. But it depends on where you start the clock.
Only 15 years after the fact, for example, did Obama claim that “someone else” filled out the 1996 survey when he was running for the state senate that enthusiastically endorsed gay marriage.
Does anyone really believe that?
“President Obama is no more hypocritical than the next politician – especially if the next one is Mitt Romney – but he certainly is a hypocrite,” Plotz writes. “So while I’m thrilled to celebrate his support for gay marriage, as little as it means legally, I’m irked by his all-too-eloquent conversion story.”
I’d say he’s far more of a hypocrite because the central rationale for his presidency was that . . . he wasn’t a hypocrite like the rest of them.
And if nobody’s really buying his conversion story, don’t we have a serial liar on our hands – someone toying with a civil rights issue out of rank political opportunism?
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Obama’s position is creationism, not evolution. He waited for the right time to create a rationale for a declaration he always knew he would make.
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Or we could look at his conversion as genuine. After all, for years he declared that his opposition to gay marriage was based on his religious beliefs – something the media gave him a free pass on.
After all, his church endorsed gay marriage long ago.
“Presidential hopeful Barack Obama belongs to the United Church of Christ, one of the country’s most racially diverse and liberal Protestant denominations – the first to ordain an openly gay minister and to call for equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender,” the Sun-Times wrote in 2007.
What, then, did Obama find in the scripture that his church did not?
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To recap: When Obama ran for state senate from Hyde Park, then, he was all for gay marriage. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he was against it. What religious beliefs did he discover between the first and the second?
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“I’m a Christian,” Obama said during that 2004 U.S. Senate campaign. “And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”
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Also during that 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama’s campaign made the Cheney comparison itself.
“Barack Obama is opposed to gay marriage but believes in civil unions as a policy, and secondly, our position on a Constitutional amendment is exactly the same position as Vice President Dick Cheney’s in that it’s unnecessary,” spokesman Robert Gibbs told the Tribune.
Neat. Notice how he’s really saying Obama’s position on a Constitutional amendment was the same as Cheney’s, while making it sound like their positions on gay marriage were too. They weren’t. Cheney was in favor.
In any case, the Cheney reference as a signal to independent conservatives and Downstate voters. Meanwhile, the campaign placed ads in gay publications voicing its support of their agenda. It was the ol’ okey-dokey.
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In The Audacity of Hope, published two years after Cheney’s declaration of support for gay marriage, Obama wrote that “the heightened focus on [gay] marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians.”
And then left himself an out:
“I was reminded that it is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claim infallibility in my support of abortion rights.”
I just may evolve!
“I must admit that I may have been infected with society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus’ call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in the years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I don’t believe such doubts make me a bad Christian. I believe they make me human, limited in my understandings of God’s purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with the belief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open to new revelations – whether they come form a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed to abortion.”
How clever. He could be wrong about abortion, too!
The first question for Obama today, then, should perhaps be what new revelation he found in the Bible. Just which passages are you referring to, Mr. President?
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Obama’s gay games were so extraordinarily calculated that when acolyte Eric Zorn urged him to run for president in 2008 before he could establish a fuller, more problematic record, one of his examples was Obama’s “playing both sides of the gay marriage issue while more courageous Democrats in the Senate come out in support.”
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In 2007, during the presidential campaign, Obama dodged and weaved.
“As Obama left a firefighters convention last week, a Newsday reporter asked him whether he thought homosexuality was immoral,” the Tribune reported.
“Obama’s first answer was: ‘I think traditionally the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has restricted his public comments to military matters. That’s probably a good tradition to follow.’
“Asked a second time, he said: ‘I think the question here is whether somebody is willing to sacrifice for their country.’
“When asked a third time, the senator ignored the question, signed an autograph, posed for a photo and then jumped into a Lincoln Town Car.”
Then things got funky.
On a fundraising committee conference call that day, former state Sen. Bill Marovitz asked how the campaign planned to address the matter because he had continued to hear complaints. “I said it needs to be something that is dealt with directly,” he said.
But Marovitz, who is married to Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner, disputes that Obama was trying to dodge the initial question. He said he believes Obama was just trying to get into a car without launching into a full-blown discussion of gay and lesbian issues.
“He has repeatedly in speeches . . . made his position clear on the importance of equality for everyone,” Marovitz said. “I don’t think anyone in the gay or lesbian community should have any doubt where Barack stands on this issue.”
With the matter lingering Monday, Obama sought to make his views clear on national television.
“I don’t think that homosexuals are immoral any more than I think heterosexuals are immoral,” he told Larry King on CNN. “I think that people are people and to categorize one group of folks based on their sexual orientation that way I think is wrong.”
Clear?
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When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoed a bill in February that would have permitted same-sex marriage in his state, he said he thought the issue was one that voters should decide in a referendum.
Liberals savagely attacked Christie, ignoring the fact that Christie’s position was a step ahead of Obama’s. Now Obama has caught up and their positions are identical: Gay marriage is neither a federal matter nor a matter for lawmakers to decide, but a matter for voters in each state to decide. Over and over again, if they wish.
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Administration officials demanding – and getting – anonymity for reasons unknown are telling any reporter who will listen that Obama “changed his mind” about gay marriage a few months ago and planned to announced just that sometime before the Democratic National Convention.
If true, that doesn’t say much for Obama: He was just going to keep it to himself for the better part of a year until it was politically convenient?
What the administration doesn’t want anyone to think is that A) he was going to play it safe by waiting until after the election to tell anyone, or that B) his hand was forced by Joe Biden’s statement, reported as gaffe by some and as part of the president’s political strategy by others, that he supported gay marriage.
It’s hard to believe Obama would announce such a change in position right before the convention. Way to overshadow your coronation!
It would also be a risky campaign ploy; we already know he was calculating the politics of when he announced his new view, so we have to assume he would have done the same this summer.
See why he’s not to be believed?
In fact, the administration began floating trial balloons like this one in the Washington Post in March.
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The narrative coming out of the White House is that “Obama’s family influenced his gay marriage shift.”
It’s a nice, heartwarming tale, but wholly unbelievable.
First, the administration denied last summer that Michelle Obama supported gay marriage.
Second, there’s no reason he couldn’t tell his kids the same thing he’s told a nation: He thinks marriage is between a man and woman. Based on his religious beliefs.
Third, really? After all the thinking, reading, debating talking and evolving he’s done over the years it took some recent conversations with his family to bring his wrongheadedness to light?
“There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents, and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently,” Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts. “It doesn’t make sense to them and frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.”
That might be true if Obama was living in a cave up to now, but otherwise is the sort of thing a reporter might press the president on.
That’s why Roberts got the assignment.
“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,” John Cook reports in his Gawker post.
(And if you’re going to use your daughters as political props, you’re going to have to make them available for interviews. Describe those conversations you had with your daddy, girls.)
Other reports have Obama citing the experience of being around gay staffers who have enlightened him. Please. He’s been around gay people for a long, long time. His church was particularly gay-friendly. He’s just now come to see what their lives are like?
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Just a few hours after conducting the interview, Barack Obama sent out a fundraising e-mail that made it sound like he simply answered a question honestly – which would the first time for this particular question, as we’ve shown – instead of the truth about how he drafted Roberts for the task of delivering a politically calculated message:
Today, I was asked a direct question and gave a direct answer:
I believe that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
I hope you’ll take a moment to watch the conversation, consider it, and weigh in yourself on behalf of marriage equality:
http://my.barackobama.com/Marriage
I’ve always believed that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally. I was reluctant to use the term marriage because of the very powerful traditions it evokes. And I thought civil union laws that conferred legal rights upon gay and lesbian couples were a solution.
But over the course of several years I’ve talked to friends and family about this. I’ve thought about members of my staff in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships who are raising kids together. Through our efforts to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, I’ve gotten to know some of the gay and lesbian troops who are serving our country with honor and distinction.
What I’ve come to realize is that for loving, same-sex couples, the denial of marriage equality means that, in their eyes and the eyes of their children, they are still considered less than full citizens.
Even at my own dinner table, when I look at Sasha and Malia, who have friends whose parents are same-sex couples, I know it wouldn’t dawn on them that their friends’ parents should be treated differently.
So I decided it was time to affirm my personal belief that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
I respect the beliefs of others, and the right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines. But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally. And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them.
Cleverly, Obama left out a sentence that would complete his current position.
“Where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them. And where states enact bans on same-sex marriage, no federal act should stand in their way.”
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Miraculously, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has also seen the light.
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And then this, from the campaign’s finance director:
Steve —
I am just so happy.
If you’re proud of our president, this is a great time to make a donation to the campaign:
https://donate.barackobama.com/This-Is-Why
– Rufus
Rufus Gifford
National Finance Director
Obama for America
I’d be happy if I were you, too. It was just reported that the campaign raised a million bucks in 90 minutes after the president’s announcement.
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One in six Obama bundlers is gay.
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One thing’s for sure, judging by the reaction I’ve seen so far: The base is fired up again in a way I haven’t seen since those heady days of 2008. Mission accomplished.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on May 10, 2012