Barack Obama’s position on gay marriage hasn’t so much “evolved”
as revolved. In 1996, as a state Senate candidate in Illinois, he
told Outlines (which became the Windy City
Times), a gay magazine based on Chicago’s North Side, that he
supported “legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight any
effort to prohibit such marriages.”
Even some on the left acknowledge that he and his aides have
been lying about his supposed evolution on gay marriage for
years. “He always supported it,” David Plotz of Slate has
written.
In order to win the White House in 2008 and 2012, Obama and his
aides just decided to dupe the American people. They claimed that
Obama hadn’t filled out that 1996 gay marriage survey, even though
his signature appears clearly on it.
At a 2011 Network Nations blogger conference, an exasperated and
scoffing host asked White House Communications Director Dan
Pfeiffer, “So it was a fake questionnaire?” The rattled aide
responded: “If you actually go back and look, that questionnaire
was actually filled out by someone else, not the President. There
was a long debate about this in the campaign…. This was litigated
in the campaign.” He added, “The president has never favored
same-sex marriage. He is against it.”
David Axelrod lied brazenly in both campaigns too, saying Obama
“does oppose same-sex marriage,” which had been his position
“throughout” his career.
So for almost two decades Obama has been lying through his
teeth, flip-flopping this way and that, depending upon the
political needs of the moment. Last year’s limited modified hangout
position was that he considered gay marriage a matter for the
states to decide. His support for it was merely “personal.” Joe
Biden’s declaration in favor of “men marrying men” forced Obama
into telling this lie earlier than he wanted. He had planned to
roll it out at the Charlotte convention, but Joe “got out a little
over his skis.”
This was an easy enough lie for him to maintain as the Romney
campaign never bothered to challenge him on it. That Obama was
going to nationalize gay marriage didn’t come up a single time in
the campaign or the debates. The Romney campaign couldn’t even
bring itself to defend Chick-fil-A against Rahm Emanuel.
“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,” Obama told ABC, which added
that the “president stressed that this is a personal position, and
that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on
their own.”
Last week, Obama said that states should not decide the issue on
their own. His statement still had a smarmy, hedging tone about it
(notice the word “probably”), but that’s what he ends up saying:
“And if the state doesn’t have a good reason [to justify
Proposition 8], it should be struck down. That’s the core
principle, as applied to this case. The court may decide that if it
doesn’t apply in this case, it probably can’t apply in any case.
There’s no good reason for it. If I were on the court, that’d
probably be the view that I’d put forward. But, but I’m not a
judge, I’m the president.”
The press, of course, plays along with this weasely charade,
asking him fawning questions about his “evolution” instead of
asking him: Why have you been lying since 1996? Why couldn’t you
win the White House honestly? Don’t you feel like a coward and
fraud for having faked up a position which your Justice Department
now calls unconstitutional discrimination? Don’t you feel ashamed
of having to make up lines in your memoirs about how “I may be seen
as someone who was on the wrong side of history”?
The key to frying frogs is to turn up the temperature slowly.
That’s the amoral Obama-Alinskyite approach to politics. You just
lie, lie, lie, until it is politically safe to state the real
liberal position clearly. As Alinsky bragged to his community
organizers, “I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire
on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he
would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be
executed on Monday.”
Obama must chuckle privately with his aides about how easy it is
to con the American people through such methods. The next layer of
deception to peel back is Obama’s claim that he respects religious
freedom and would never dream of imposing gay marriage on religious
denominations. He respects the “sacraments.” Never mind that his
wife has said that gay marriage belongs at the “altar.”
When the coast is clear, liberals will pressure religions into
embracing gay marriage. Those that refuse will be branded “bigoted”
and “discriminatory” and thus unworthy of governmental
recognition.
The left doesn’t seem to mind Obama’s frog-frying methods and
the dirt that collects on his halo. They take his expedient lies in
stride, though one would think the staff at the Windy City
Times might demand an apology.
