President Obama has sent his second in command on ahead with a message for voters in the upcoming presidential election: legalizing same-sex marriage will be a major rung of the Administration’s re-election ladder. During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press May 6, Vice President Joe Biden said that he would be just fine with fully legalizing homosexual relationships. “Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love?” Biden said in an attempt to equate same-sex partnerships with traditional marriage. He emphasized that “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”
The New York Times noted that Biden’s “unexpectedly expansive remarks made him by far the highest-ranking White House official to move closer to a formal embrace of same-sex marriage, which is now legal in six states and the District of Columbia but is unrecognized by the federal government. The Obama administration has endorsed civil unions but not marriage for gay couples.”
While aides insisted that Biden’s comments were spontaneous, and the Times portrayed the White House as “scrambling to clarify that Mr. Biden was not articulating an official change in policy,” the Vice President himself was certainly not deviating from the Obama administration’s efforts to move the nation closer to normalizing homosexuality. Over the past three years, the President has made a number of overt plays for the “gay” vote, among them pressing for the dismantling of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy that kept homosexuals from serving openly in the military, and instructing his Department of Justice to stop defending the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage for federal purposes as only between a man an a woman.
Obama’s pretense of continuing to “weigh” the issue in his mind is transparently disingenuous, given the fact that he has spent the past year fawning over gay groups with rhetoric and policy designed to assure them of his support for fully legalizing homosexual marriage. But as the Washington Post noted, the President knows that not every group in the broad voter base he is counting on to re-elect him fully embraces homosexual marriage.
For example, noted the Post, “African Americans, one of the main pillars of the President’s political coalition, remain decidedly skeptical about gay marriage. In the last year’s worth of Post-ABC data, just 42 percent said they support legalization while 55 percent oppose it.” Similar numbers pop up for Hispanics and other minorities, making it politically risky for the President to raise the rainbow flag over the White House just yet.
But even as the President continues to “struggle personally” over the issue, he nonetheless aggressively pushes to increase his political stock in the homosexual activist community. For example, reported the Baptist Press, President Obama’s re-election website recently “posted a timeline of 40 specific accomplishments his administration has made for the gay community….”
Beginning in 2009 “when he ordered the federal government to extend some benefits to the partners of gay federal employees,” noted Baptist Press, the pro-homosexual timeline extends all the way to March of this year, “when he announced his opposition to a North Carolina constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between one man and one woman.”
In addition to these “accomplishments” on behalf of homosexuals, the timeline lists the following (to highlight just a few):
• June 29, 2009: “Hosted the first-ever White House LGBT Pride reception.”
• Oct. 21, 2009: “Created a National Resource Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Elders.”
• Jan. 1, 2010: “Banned discrimination in federal workplaces based on gender identity.”
• July 19, 2011: “Endorsed the Respect for Marriage Act, a legislative effort to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.”
• Feb. 2, 2012: “Announced White House LGBT Conference Series to address issues affecting LGBT Americans, including health, housing, and safety.”
• March 15, 2012: “Michael Fitzgerald, fourth openly gay nominee under President Obama, is confirmed to the federal bench in California.”
Of course, leaders in the homosexual lobby are aware that Obama is playing politics with their exclusive issue, and have become more restive at his reluctance to come out unequivocally for “gay” rights. The Times noted that Obama “faces growing calls from gay and lesbian voters and a formidable array of wealthy gay donors to support same-sex marriage and make it a part of the Democratic Party’s platform at its convention.”
Some have also “expressed frustration and dismay … over attempts by the White House to play down the vice president’s words and said that the president’s own endorsement of same-sex marriage was long overdue,” continued the Times.
An open endorsement is unlikely to happen as long as there are significant voter blocs Obama wants to reach that are less than enthusiastic about legalized homosexual marriage in America. Meanwhile, the President has sent out others to reach out to the homosexual crowd. The Associated Press reported that on May 7, the day after Biden’s endorsement, Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that he also supports same-sex marriage. “In an interview on MSNBC, Duncan was asked if he believes same-sex couples should be able to legally marry,” reported AP. “He responded: ‘Yes, I do.’”
Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s most vocal homosexual activist group, used Duncan’s comments to pressure the President to make his own declaration. “Duncan speaking out is particularly important given his role as the nation’s top education official,” Solmonese commented. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the President shares these values and that it’s time for him to speak out in favor of marriage equality as well.”
Meanwhile, the President has officially gone no further than his comments in 2010, when he said that “attitudes evolve, including mine, and I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships.”
While Americans who embrace the institution of traditional marriage can rest assured that Obama will be committed to destroying that foundation of stable society if he is re-elected, homosexual activists may continue to be disappointed in their desire to hear him openly admit to such a goal.
Photo of Vice President Biden: AP Images
