Stop claiming Biden, Obama, Clinton, et al. supported marriage amendments—they did not.

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09/29/2014

by Jeremy Hooper

This comes from an Op-Ed that anti-gay activists Ryan Anderson and Edwin Meese managed to place in the Washington Post:

This month, in a widely celebrated opinion written by Judge Richard Posner, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit declared that it had “no reason to think [the governments of Indiana and Wisconsin] have a ‘reasonable basis’ for forbidding same-sex marriage.”

This is remarkable. According to this court, the millions of citizens who passed marriage amendments in more than 30 states were all bigots acting on no reasonable basis when they supported marriage as the union of a man and woman — just as President Obama, Vice President Biden, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and most members of Congress all did when these laws were passed.
FULL: Let states, not courts, decide marriage policy [WaPo]

First, I'm so tired of the "bigots" thing. Few people in the marriage movement are claiming that every single person who ever supported or, especially, voted for a marriage amendment is a bigot. Many people were misled. Other people hadn't put enough mind to the subject and just stuck with status quo. Some were convinced by opportunistic religious figures who put the fear of God into them. And so on. The concept of marriage equality was new to all of us, at some point, and many Americans of good will had to go on a journey before coming to a place of understanding and acceptance.

Secondly, it is an abject, careless, purposely misleading lie to claim that President Obama, Veep Biden, or Hillary Clinton were ever on the same side as those who supported marriage amendments. Not only did these three not support marriage amendments, but all three actively opposed them on both the state and federal level. Even before they supported marriage equality in full, all three were against amendments like the ones Judge Posner found unconstitutional. Hillary Clinton referred to such amendments as "enshrining discrimination" and "unfortunate." President Obama came out against every single marriage amendment that was proposed during his time in prominent office. Joe Biden called California's proposed marriage amendment "regressive" and "unfair," and, while in the US Senate, was a staunch opponent of a federal version of a marriage amendment. So even when they did, in fact, make personal comments about marriage being limited to a man and a woman, they—all of them and many more—still opposed the ideas that Ryan Anderson and Edwin Meese would like to enact on the state and local level!

I know it's convenient for wrong-side-of-history Republicans to hold up these prominent Democrats' longer-than-we-would've-hoped evolutions in order to make their own desired discrimination seem more palatable. But they should know that when they play this fame, they are lying like lying liars.

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