Very sad this morning for my two Aunts who live in NC. They retired down there and have been the stable relationship I have tried to model my marriage of 19 years on. THey have been with each other since 1970. Very disappointing morning indeed.
Yeah, he could have said something sooner, and yeah, you could argue it's just political waffling, but it doesn't make it any less important.
To quote from Harry Potter, there comes a time when you have to choose between what is right and what is easy.
I don't think that this will cost Obama the election - if he loses, it will be for economic reasons.
Not all youths live in MA, NY and CA.
It has been right to say this for at least 20 years, if not before then.
It looks like there's a small majority supporting this at the moment (see: Half of Americans Support Gay Marriage ), but it's only barely a majority. Plus the support is slightly down from last year.
More important is the breakdown of the support. According to this article First Read - Is Obama's gay marriage stance all about suburban voters? some of the most important groups for Obama's re-election are still split on it.
What doesn't make sense is that it's not like SSM was legal or pending legality. It was never legal, it's legality isn't an issue.
This amendment absolutely proves one of the main contentions in the Prop 8 brief -- that those against SSM are motivated by animus towards a long despised minority.
Very sad this morning for my two Aunts who live in NC. They retired down there and have been the stable relationship I have tried to model my marriage of 19 years on. THey have been with each other since 1970. Very disappointing morning indeed.
and again WA was never in doubt, I could list a few more.
FL, VA, NC, OH, PA, MO states like these are where this is a net lost at election time.
matt blaze @mattblaze
The people unhappy about the president's gay marriage position can take some comfort in the fact that it no longer involves evolution.
Absolutely.
I think that Obama is a political animal. If he thought that this would cost him the election, he wouldn't have done it. Call me cynical.
Opposition to same sex marriage also generally tracks support for conservative policies in general. I am unpersuaded that a meaningful/substantial volume of single-issue voters exist for Obama to lose.
Romney winning the 2012 election would be a disaster for LBGT rights, starting with the fact that this would probably result in Antonin Scalia being to the left of the median Supreme Court justice. Particularly since Obama has done pretty much all that is within his power to advance marriage equality in policy terms, if supporting same-sex marriage would make a Romney victory more likely, his unwillingness to openly support same-sex marriage is defensible (like LBJ's nominal pre-1957 opposition to civil rights).
But I don't think there's any reason to believe that Obama doing the right thing today will help Romney in November. It's important to remember that Obama and Romney were substantially different on gay and lesbian rights before this afternoon. To believe that Romney will benefit significantly from Obama's embrace of same-sex marriage rights, you would have to believe that there's a group of voters who 1) care enough about same-sex marriage to make it their top priority in a federal election, but 2) are willing to ignore Obama's pro-LBGT rights record as long as he doesn't nominally support same-sex marriage. The number of people who fit into this class is too trivial to be worth worrying about. It's likely that some-risk adverse advisers cited the argument that same-sex marriage cost John Kerry the election in 2004. But there's no evidence that this is true. Given that same-sex marriage is significantly more popular now than it was eight years ago, it's even more unlikely that same-sex marriage would damage Obama now.
Obama embracing same-sex marriage was the right thing to do, and there's no reason to believe that it will be politically damaging. Presidential elections generally don't turn on social issues and it's hard to imagine that 2012 will be an exception (even if we assume that Obama's position is a net negative, which is possible but hardly self-evident).
The (logical) conclusion is that “moral values” and the gay marriage backlash played a key role in Bush’s victory.
Political scientists believe the exact opposite. In an article by Ansolabehere and Stewart III, appropriately titled, Moral values and the gay-marriage backlash did not help Bush, they argue that, the “Marriage referenda mobilized voters on both sides, not just the conservatives, and the net result may have been to John Kerry’s benefit.” Here are the facts from Ansolabehere and Stewart III:
Here's another notch for Jon Stewart's list of examples of hypocrisy amongst conservatives.
"A war on women??? Ho ho, what a preposterous thing to suggest! A war. Pfft!"
"OBAMA HAS DECLARED WAR ON MARRIAGE!"
Get bent, you turkeys.
yeah, he could have said something later, if Biden did not blow this thing wide open.