Obama's "evolving" on marriage: Open mind or fence-straddling?



President Obama's latest reflections on same-sex marriage -- that "attitudes evolve, including mine" -- have been interpreted pretty much the same by gay-rights supporters and opponents: as a signal that he has an open mind and is moving toward endorsing marriage for gays and lesbians.
"Presidents don't usually think out loud unless they intend to send a signal that they are shifting a position," Richard Socarides, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues, told Politico.com. He said he thinks Obama knows "he can't run as a gay-rights advocate in 2012 and be against marriage equality."
An article from Baptist Press, published the day after Obama's Oct. 27 comments to a group of bloggers, also saw signs of a change in position and warned that legalization of same-sex marriage "will negatively affect all of society." Conservatives and liberals alike, the publication said, "have wondered whether Obama privately supports 'gay marriage' and whether his public opposition to it is purely political."
From an even more skeptical perspective, though, the president's remarks -- less than a week before the Nov. 2 election -- could be viewed as coming from a politician with his finger firmly in the wind.
Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, the state's largest gay-rights organization, offered this translation: "Let me see where the polls are going and I'm going with them."
"It doesn't really upset the people who oppose allowing same-sex couples to marry because he doesn't say he's changed his position," Kors said. "He's trying to tell LGBT people and those who support the freedom to marry that he's moving in our direction, so we should all make sure we come out and vote."
An uncharitable interpretation, perhaps. But Obama's studied ambivalence, and his history on the issue, make it hard to discern what he actually believes.
As a candidate for the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he answered a questionnaire from a gay-oriented newspaper by saying he supported legalizing same-sex marriage. Eight years later, another gay-rights publication quoted Obama, as a U.S. Senate candidate, as saying he now opposed same-sex marriage "primarily as a strategic issue."
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama said his opposition was religious. Marriage between a man and a woman was "a sacred union," he said at a candidates' forum -- while also opposing Proposition 8, the November 2008 California initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage. Three years earlier, the governing body of the United Church of Christ, the church Obama had attended for most of his adult life, endorsed the right of gays and lesbians to marry.
Obama didn't mention religion in his Oct. 27 discussion with liberal bloggers, saying instead that he has been "unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage."
But attitudes evolve, he observed, and it's "an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships."
"I think it's pretty clear where the trendlines are going," Obama concluded, leaving it unclear whether he was referring to society's trendlines or his own.
Kors, who led a petition drive urging Obama to join the legal battle against Prop. 8 -- and received no response -- said the president's apparent search for a middle ground is questionable as both policy and politics.
"I think poll-driven, fence-straddling politics has never really been popular," he said. "People like politicians who actually stand for something."
Posted By: Bob Egelko (Email) | November 29 2010 

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