Why did Obama change positions on gay marriage? Gee…what a mystery
The Scripps-Howard News Service is mulling over President “Obama’s unexplained reversal of the position he once held backing same-sex marriage.”
The article references Obama’s pro-marriage equality statements from the 90s — Change of Subject readers learned of them more than a year ago — and his backtracking, which I analyzed here nearly three years ago. It adds this element:
Obama’s reference to his religious convictions about marriage …contrasts with the position of the denomination with which he has been most closely associated, the United Church of Christ….
In 2005, the United Church of Christ’s governing General Synod passed a resolution endorsing “equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender.” The church, with 1.1 million members, is the largest U.S. denomination to support same-sex marriage.
I will say this again:
History will snort at the moral and intellectual flabbiness of Obama’s conversion to the civil unions yes, gay marriage no position, which I believe to be calculated and purely political.
But history may hail this position as pragmatic — a stepping-stone for progressive politicians whose hearts incline toward true equality but see in embracing “the M-word” the same sort of political suicide performed by those who were, for example, in the vanguard of the abolition of slavery.
“Gay marriage” remains something of a toxic term. “Marriage” has deep religious and cultural roots; a certain meaning and significance that divorce-crazy heterosexuals cling to as their own special institution.
“Gay marriage” is polling better and better, but still isn’t embraced by the majority, even though, when you ask the public if it supports allowing gays to enjoy partnership rights and responsibilities that are nearly identical to marriage partnership rights and responsibilities, the answer is usually a solid yes.
A few years ago I wrote a column asking those who profess opposition to gay marriage to spell out for me which of the more than 1,000 legal benefits, rights, privileges and obligations associated with marriage they feel should be denied to gay couples.
A prominent anti-gay marriage activist I interviewed could come up with only one: The right to adopt children–a right gay couples now have nearly everywhere.
Not to make too much of the abolition / gay marriage analogy, but it does occur to me that slavery was abolished under the leadership of a president — the sainted Abraham Lincoln — who did not campaign as an abolitionist (he simply said he wanted to limit the spread of slavery and was seen, therefore, as a more electable moderate than an abolitionist candidate).
Should Lincoln have been a staunch, principled abolitionist in the 1850s, political concerns be damned? Would it have hastened the day of abolition if he had?
History now looks back kindly on Lincoln, of course.
But in the moment, it’s often awfully hard to tell pragmatism from hypocrisy, cowardice or plain old stubborn wrong-headedness.
For Obama and gays, the jury is still out.
