On Wednesday, the real Barack Obama stood up. He is a better man and a better president for having done so. And America is a better country.
Homophobia is the last refuge of open bigotry in American life. Racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny still exist, but they lurk in the shadows. It is no longer socially acceptable in any segment of society to openly say that blacks are violent or Latinos are lazy or Jews are grasping or women are genetically inferior. But it is still acceptable to say the crudest and most hate-filled things about gay people. In his 1999 book “One Nation, After All,” sociologist Alan Wolfe found that Americans were remarkably tolerant and open-minded about every controversial subject except one: homosexuality. Attitudes toward gays have become far more enlightened during the last 13 years, but Wolfe’s findings touch on a profound social reality: Many Americans still feel gays are somehow unacceptable, or scary, or immoral, or just different in some way that makes it acceptable to discriminate against them and/or openly disparage them.
That does not mean that all of the North Carolinians, for example, who voted Tuesday for an amendment outlawing same-sex marriages are homophobes. Many of them simply believe that marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples because that’s the way marriage has traditionally been defined, and they believe that defending tradition as important. But their personal views have become irrelevant. The fact is that same-sex marriage has become a national civil rights issue, and as such, it has enormous symbolic importance. To simply stand on the sidelines and not take a position on it, as Obama tried to do until Wednesday, is to tacitly accept that gay people are second-class citizens. This narrow, legalistic approach to gay marriage only encourages bigotry and stands in the way of needed progress. It was necessary for Obama to take a risk – and take a stand.
I did not think he would do it. But he did.
Obama dislikes conflict, and he dislikes risk even more. Some of that is both understandable and justifiable. Politics is the art of the possible. You have to get elected to get anything done. And to get elected, or reelected, you have to make compromises. That is why Obama hid behind the transparently false excuse that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.” He wanted to avoid a hot-button issue that could potentially cost him the election.
To be sure, that was a questionable political tactic. Advocates argued that Obama faced little political risk in endorsing same-sex marriage because the social conservatives for whom this issue is crucial were not going to vote for him anyway. Moreover, they argued that the number of swing and independent voters the president would lose would be more than made up for increased turnout among his supporters.
Those arguments may be correct – but they may not be. We just don’t know. North Carolina is a swing state. It just voted to ban same-sex marriage. It is indeed possible that Obama will lose the election because he took the opposite position.
It is no secret that Obama has sorely disappointed his most ardent supporters. Throughout his first term, he has consistently refused to do anything truly politically risky. He spoke of fundamentally changing the rules and culture of Wall Street – then stood by as the same looters who destroyed the economy gamed the system. He talked up a progressive reform of healthcare – and ended up with a watered-down version of a Republican idea. He announced a bold stimulus package – then made it too small to be fully effective. He gave the best speech about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis ever given by an American president – then caved in to the Israel lobby. And so on.
But there are times when pragmatism must take a back seat to principle. And to his undying credit, Obama decided that this was one of them. He decided that it was more important for him, the leader of the United States, to stand up and defend the rights of an abused minority group, than to accept the unacceptable status quo.
We don’t know why he decided to take the risk. A cynic – or perhaps a realist – might simply say that he decided there was no risk, that most Americans would stand with him on this issue. But I prefer to think of his decision as being at least in part shaped by the two most crucial, and inseparable, parts of his identity: his blackness, and his profoundly inclusive ideals. As president, Obama has never played the race card, never asserted his racial identity in any significant way. This reticence is both politically astute and deeply grounded in Obama’s own sense of what race means – and does not mean. For Obama, race matters – but paradoxically, it matters precisely because it offers all of us, black or white or brown or yellow or red, an opportunity to transcend it. In that regard, Obama is a true child of the civil rights movement. The men and women who struggled and died at Selma and Birmingham and Little Rock and Neshoba County are his heroes, and he was not going to betray their memory. That’s bedrock for him.
What happened yesterday is that Barack Obama, as flawed and brave and human as the rest of us, just struck his own bedrock. And the sound of that pick hitting stone brought tears to my eyes.
He did not have to do it. History is filled with crucial decisions that did not have to be taken. Gandhi could have decided the Salt March was too divisive. John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have decided that extending the hand of friendship to the USSR at the height of the Cold War, in his famous American University speech, was too politically risky. Lyndon Baines Johnson could have decided the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not worth spending so much political capital on. Martin Luther King could have decided that white America was not ready for a campaign of civil disobedience. The hundreds of thousands of Arab men and women who risked their lives to demand justice, opportunity and freedom could have turned back when the club-wielding thugs appeared. The Occupy protesters who came out in the rain to demand that America live up to its ideals could have stayed home.
But they did not. Those people – leaders and ordinary citizens alike — took the risk. They did the right thing. And history will remember them, and honor them, when the pragmatists and calculators have long been forgotten.
The night before he was shot, Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to prophesy his own death. “But it doesn’t really matter with me now,” he said. “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Obama could lose the presidency because he stood up for the rights of gay Americans. But if he does, for the rest of his life he can look back and know that when it counted most, he did the right thing. That is something no one can ever take away from him. Or from the American people.
“God is the author of marriage,” came the declaration of National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown moments after President Obama’s historic ABC News interview aired this afternoon. It cannot be redefined, Brown charged, “according to presidential whim.”
Indeed not, but while Obama’s expressed support for marriage equality changes nothing legally, his words — and particularly those about how his faith informed his views — signal a new direction away from kowtowing to a religiously narrow concept of marriage. In previous statements Obama had parroted the conservative line about “one man and one woman” and just two years ago paid homage to “traditional marriage.” Today Obama explicitly rejected the idea that religious conservatives have a monopoly, either legally or rhetorically, on defining marriage as a straights-only institution.
As the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance pointed out, “it is the Constitution, not his religion that should form the basis of his position.” Yet while Obama certainly shouldn’t say that his religious views dictate policy or legislation, his discussion of how his faith informed his own thinking may signal a political turning point. By rejecting the idea that “true” Christianity demands fealty to “one man and one woman,” Obama appeared less invested in pandering to religious conservatives like Rick Warren, Jim Wallis or Joel Hunter, Obama’s spiritual advisor, who say they’re concerned about issues beyond the culture war but nonetheless remain opposed to marriage equality.
Somehow, though, Obama will have to square this newfound position with his allegiance to anti-equality religious figures. The director of the Democratic National Committee’s faith outreach, the Rev. Derrick Harkins, for example, is opposed to same-sex marriage. While he’s not “a bomb-thrower in terms of saying things that will get a rise out of a crowd,” he told me last year, he is still opposed to same-sex marriage, calling it a “vexing” theological issue. Now the president is for it, but the director of the party’s faith outreach is not.
Republicans, though, are gloating, because they think Obama’s change of heart will energize voters to pull the lever for the flip-flopping Mitt Romney. Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, whose chief talking point following the 2010 midterms was that evangelical turnout decides elections, threatened that Obama’s turnabout “is certain to fuel a record turnout of voters of faith to the polls this November.” Romney, said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in a statement, “may have been handed the key to social conservative support by President Obama.” And Mike Huckabee, whose name was floated earlier in the day by National Review as a possible Romney running mate to energize the social conservative base, maintained that marriage “is going to be a defining issue this election.”
There are already signs that conservatives are going to taunt Obama with predictions of losing black voters. In his statement, Perkins took pains to point out that majority-black counties in North Carolina voted in favor of Amendment 1, the constitutional amendment that will ban not just same-sex marriage, but civil unions and domestic partnerships as well. (Obama opposed the amendment, although his decision not to campaign in North Carolina in the days before the vote was seen as skittishness over alienating voters in a traditionally Republican state that gave him its electoral votes in 2008.)
Perhaps any black and Latino voters who might be moved to vote against Obama over this single issue should take a look at NOM’s own strategy document, in which the organization admits it aims to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies.” Targeting Latinos, NOM wants to “interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity — a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.” And it wants to portray Obama as a “social radical” unfit for the presidency.
Picking up on that last theme, Rick Santorum accused Obama of “radical social engineering” and blamed “cultural elites” for undermining “the institution that gives the best opportunity for healthy, happy children and a just and prosperous society.”
But public opinion is not on NOM’s side, except for the base it already attracts. While a vast majority (77-21 percent) of white evangelicals remain steadfastly opposed to marriage equality and a smaller segment of minority Christians (50-43 percent) oppose it, other groups — Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews and the unaffiliated — support it, according to recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute. And a recent polling analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that “since 2008, the proportion of African Americans favoring gay marriage has increased from 26 percent to 39 percent, while opposition has fallen from 63 percent to 49 percent.” Another PRRI analysis found that “younger black Millennials (age 18-24) and younger black Protestant Millennials demonstrate more support for same-sex marriage than black Americans overall.” The younger someone is, the more likely he or she is to support same-sex marriage, although young white evangelicals remain the most resistant.
Before Obama’s announcement, the Romney campaign had been reaching out to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an outspoken opponent of marriage equality and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which claims to represent 16 million Latino evangelicals. There’s a conventional wisdom that these voters matter a lot in swing states like Florida, or Colorado. But polling data on the religious breakdown of Latinos is hard to come by; a spokesperson for the Pew Hispanic Center told me the organization “does not have any data on the religious composition of Hispanics by state.” Rodriguez’s actual sway over or representation of voters has never been measured.
To be sure, the religious right is going to make as much hay over this as it can, through fundraising, campaigning, moralizing and browbeating. But in the end, it will probably turn out to be a definitive case of preaching to the choir.
I was interested that the president said he discussed the subject of same-sex marriage with his daughters. Their acceptance of the same-sex parents of some of their classmates was so automatic and total that their very ease convinced him that same-sex marriage was inevitable — and a good thing. Which shows something that anthropologists have known a long time: That innovative behavior comes from children, is passed to their mothers and recognized by their fathers last of all. This rule of innovation holds true throughout the primate world.
In our polarized country I fear that the president’s endorsement of gay marriage will be seized on by the religious right as yet another sign of his Godlessness. But religion, most Americans feel, must evolve too; the Bible must be open to contemporary interpretations, just as the Constitution is. Although Dan Savage stirred up some hostility with his recent contention that the Bible has to be reinterpreted for each generation, he made a strong case that we should no more honor Old Testament taboos of homosexuality than in its explicit endorsement of slavery.
As a man in his 70s, I grew up in an era when homosexuality was still an offense in some states punishable by death. The stigma of being gay drove my age-mates and me toward drink, suicide and years on the psychoanalytic couch in an effort to go straight. We were wracked with self-hatred, which blighted so many lives of our friends.
Same-sex marriage is a balm to the soul whether it’s an option that an individual embraces or not. The idea that our relationships could be normalized is such a happy sign for those of us who grew up feeling alienated from society and like second-class citizens. The battle is not yet won, but the president’s stand points the way toward success.
>Make no mistake: President Obama’s decision to publicly endorse gay marriage carries serious political risk, though also moral reward. Every state gay-marriage ban referendum has passed, except one in Arizona that was rewritten and adopted on a second try. And in swing states, from North Carolina (which just banned both marriage and civil unions Tuesday) to Nevada to Virginia, the president’s stance could cost him votes.
The latest Gallup poll shows that public opinion has gotten a little cooler toward gay marriage in just the last year, though most Americans support it. The sad truth is, most Americans may back it, but those who oppose it have been far more motivated to cast votes based on their animus, so far anyway.
That said, it was the right and necessary thing for the president to do. Future generations will look back and wonder what took him so long. The president believes in the saying attributed Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Despite his too-slow “evolution” on gay marriage, Obama knows the arc bends faster when we pull on it, and today he gave it a good tug.
Like Vice President Joe Biden, who clearly deserves credit for accelerating this public “evolution,” Obama cast his decision in personal terms, telling ABC’s Robin Roberts:
I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
Cynics are already saying that Obama’s decision is pegged to big fundraisers in Hollywood and New York over the next few days. I honestly think the risk is higher than the reward, and the president made a personal decision. “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married” isn’t the most stirring call to justice, but it sounds honest to me.
I remember thinking Mayor Gavin Newsom was doing a politically dangerous thing when he began marrying couples at San Francisco City Hall in 2003. Then I went and watched the weddings – and I was converted to the notion that there can be no compromise on marriage rights. Fellow Democrats blamed Newsom for costing John Kerry the election the next November, and no one can say for certain that he didn’t. Karl Rove surely used gay marriage as a wedge issue in 2004, pushing ballot initiatives in swing states to beef up the GOP’s Christian right turnout. And yet once I saw real individuals joyous at their weddings – and later crushed when the wedding spree was ended by the courts – it became impossible for me to suggest they have to wait because the country isn’t ready to give them equal rights. After he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson famously told Bill Moyers “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
But no person of conscience would today suggest Johnson did the wrong thing. “I had assumed that civil unions might have been enough,” Obama told Roberts. He did not say how long ago he realized he was wrong; it’s enough that he realized it today.
By all accounts Joe Biden did bend the arc of justice a little, with what are being called spontaneous and unplanned remarks on “Meet the Press” Sunday supporting gay marriage. The Catholic Biden, like Obama, put his evolution in very personal terms. “The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition. Who do you love?” he told David Gregory. “Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about.”
Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. Jay Carney faced 50 gay-marriage questions in Monday’s briefing, after Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Biden in supporting gay marriage on “Morning Joe.” The White House’s brief effort to deny the importance of Biden’s statement was futile and they wisely dropped it. Then they did more than that – they endorsed it.
Obama’s move may be less risky than it feels right now: Public Policy Polling has found that folks who oppose gay marriage already think the president supports it, anyway. African-Americans are less likely to support gay marriage than other groups, yet it’s hard to imagine Obama’s stance depressing black support for him given everything else that’s at stake in 2012.
I also want to say a word on behalf of the advocacy community that pushed the president to take this step – even as fervent Obama supporters insisted they were dooming the president’s reelection bid with their demands. Activists and agitators make history. Leaders rarely move to claim risky but necessary territory on their own. Congratulations to all the voices who made this happen – and to the president, who must be relieved to be able to say publicly what we’ve known he’s believed privately for a long time.
This week, Gallup’s poll showed that half of all Americans now support legalizing same sex marriage. This same week, President Obama had his spokesperson reiterate his opposition to such a move. That’s right, in the face of near-majority public support for equality, the official position of the Democratic administration is that its “feelings about this are constantly evolving” — a direct quote from the president in 2010.
In light of Obama’s past support for gay marriage as a state legislator and his recent refusal to sign an order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, it would be logical to assume that — sans a full-scale reversal (which may be in the works tonight) — the president’s position has been “evolving” toward more entrenched opposition to equality.
Yet, somehow, many liberal pundits nonetheless defended the president’s restated opposition to gay marriage this week.
Two articles in the Daily Beast sum up the bizarre arguments from the left. The first, by Jesse Singal, insists that Obama actually “supports [gay marriage], but he doesn’t think he can afford to make this support public.” The second, by Michael Tomasky, argues “that Obama should not endorse gay marriage before the election, for various political reasons, mostly because the majority that supports same-sex marriage seems a little fragile.”
Both rationales, not surprisingly, were echoed by liberals across talk radio and television throughout the week, raising a pair of disturbing questions: 1) How could any liberal defend Obama’s current opposition to gay marriage? and 2) What’s so fundamentally immoral about such a defense?
The answer to the first question is related to the fact that in red-versus-blue America, many liberals are first and foremost Democrats, leading them to defend any position taken by a Democrat, no matter how illiberal.
We’ve been reminded of this constantly during Obama’s term, as the American Left is now dominated by those who will angrily chastise a Republican politician for advocating atrocious tax, trade, war and civil liberties policies and then cheerily praise a Democratic president for advocating the exact same policies, or worse. Essentially, many liberals are desperate to see liberalism in their president, even if it’s not there. And so on an issue such as gay marriage, Obama deftly plays to that vanity with terms like “evolve” — promising-but-meaningless words that prompt his base to insist that he has a stealth scheme to make gay marriage legal — and that any pressure to force his hand somehow undermines the overall cause.
That gets to the second question about morality. However pathetic it is for liberals to manufacture Nixon-esque “secret plan” sophistry to defend a president, it’s far worse for anyone to cite political considerations as reason to endorse Obama’s current opposition to equality.
To understand why it’s worse, simply exchange “African American rights” with “gay marriage” in Tomasky’s aforementioned sentence and then re-read it. Yes, your gut reaction is correct — in that context, the sentence suddenly seems not like measured advice from a pragmatic liberal, but like a totally unacceptable bigot-appeasing screed from a Jim Crow apologist trying to stop civil rights legislation a half century ago.
Ignored as it is, the forgotten triumph over such prejudice in the 1960s is instructive in today’s battle for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. Though many Democratic partisans and Obama apparatchiks today may not want to admit it, civil rights laws didn’t originally pass because the American Left kept applauding politicians who said their positions were still “evolving.” They passed, in part, because activists set aside their partisan affinities and declared that such condescending propaganda was an intolerable excuse for inaction.
If history is any guide, the cause of equality today demands that same commitment to principle over party — even if it means making a Democratic president uncomfortable. Indeed, if Obama reverses course and endorses equality in his ABC News interview tonight, it will be because he was made sufficiently uncomfortable by civil rights activists, not because party-first sycophants praised his continued intransigence.
“The time has come,” says the hero of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play “Angels in America” in 1996. “We will be citizens.”
Looks like the 2012 election will be the moment. First, the Romney campaign appointed an openly gay foreign policy advisor, Richard Grenell. “It’s not an issue for us,” Eric Fehrenstrom, Romney’s senior adviser, reportedly said after Grenell disclosed that he was gay.
Within days, religious conservative and plain old conservative opinion makers in the Republican Party orbit unleashed a tsunami of criticism. The gay diplomatic expert actually supported same-sex marriage; what does his appointment say about Romney’s commitments, they demanded to know. Told to lie low until the controversy blew over, Grenell resigned, leaving the Romney campaign looking clumsy or spineless (or both).
Before the Obama campaign could enjoy even a few days of superior risk management, Vice President Joe Biden went on “Meet the Press” to announce that he was “perfectly comfortable” with same-sex marriage. The White House spent the rest of the day in Grenell mode, arguing that Biden wasn’t signaling a mutation in the president’s evolving gay marriage position. The issue ate up most of press secretary Jay Carney’s press briefing yesterday, as inconsistency-sniffing media ordered him to stop reciting talking points and admit the administration’s position was nonsense.
Why is this happening? Gays are at most a small percentage of the population. Support for same-sex marriage just outpolled opposition within the last year. Wasn’t it supposed to be the economy, stupid?
Biden unwittingly revealed the answer when explaining why he was in favor of marriage. He knew so many people, he said, and saw what it meant to them and to their children. He told a story of attending a fundraiser at the home of a gay couple and how impressed he was with the way they were raising their children. Even among Republicans, as Grenell’s appointment reflects, gays are out and in too great numbers for the issue to be swept into the closet once again.
The last time the gay revolution was on the table during a presidential election was 1992. Then, Bill Clinton, revealing a most uncharacteristic naiveté about the political landscape, casually announced during a Q&A at Harvard that, if elected, he would lift the ban on gays in the military. He reiterated the commitment later at a gay fundraiser arranged by longtime FOB David Mixner. Although it didn’t cost him the election, Clinton’s premature suggestion of gay military service triggered a devastating battle in the very first days of his new administration and produced the loathsome “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which embedded the exclusion into law, lasting 17 years. But that was then.
In the two decades since Clinton ran, America has changed and the change is bottom up, not the result of one man’s friendship with the inexperienced candidate. Partly because of the AIDS epidemic, which outed gay people from Roy Cohn to Rock Hudson, and partly because of the relentless ground game of gay organizations like Freedom to Marry, and partly because of, as Biden said, “Will and Grace,” gay people are an acknowledged part of the social scene. When Democratic politicians started on the fundraising circuit after Congress repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the 2010 lame duck session, they found to their surprise that it was the most popular thing they did all term.
Being visible, it now takes a visible effort to harm and marginalize them. The Republican right’s attack on the uber-conservative Richard Grenell and the graceless backward walk of the Obama campaign after Biden spoke demonstrate how ugly such efforts look when they are out in the open. It was one thing when black people willingly walked to the back of the bus. It was quite another when Birmingham sheriff Bull Connor had to use fire hoses to keep them down. Although it’s impossible to predict when the next incident will arise, it’s going to keep happening, certainly when the Democratic Party platform committee starts its deliberations. Smart campaigns would get out in front of the issue. Because there is no getting out of the way.
President Obama (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas) 
Rick Warren and Barack Obama (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon) 
David Hind, left, and Craig Francisco dance their first dance after getting married on a cruise hosted by Marriage Equality New York, soon after gay marriage was legalized in the state. (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig) 
(Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas) 
President Obama (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci) 
(Credit: AP/Salon) 
