Axelrod say's Obama's views on Gay marriage didn't "evolve"

[DigitalDrifter]

What ?!

You mean Obama lied when he claimed he was opposed to gay marriage back in '08 ?

I'm shocked !! Shocked I tell you !

Obama disputes aide David Axelrod's take on gay marriage

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is disputing a longtime aide's view that Obama feigned opposition to gay marriage, compromising his true beliefs out of concern it could hurt him with voters.


Former Obama strategistDavid Axelrod writes in a new book that Obama modified his public position to say he supported civil unions but not gay marriage. Axelrod says that was because his political advisers told him supporting gay marriages could hurt him politically.

But Obama told BuzzFeed News in an interview posted late Tuesday night that Axelrod is "mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue."

Axelrod wrote that Obama begrudgingly followed his advice that he would face strong opposition from African American religious leaders and others if he let it be known he supported gay marriage.

"Having prided himself on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position," Axelrod wrote in the memoir "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics," released Tuesday.

Axelrod's disclosure affirmed what was widely suspected for years: that Obama's May 2012 announcement that he supported gay marriage came long after the president had personally come to that conclusion. The year earlier, Obama and the White House had started saying his position was "evolving," leading many to believe he was holding off on a public embrace of gay marriage for fear it could damage his re-election prospects.

"If Obama's views were 'evolving' publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors," Axelrod wrote.

Obama told BuzzFeed News that "I always felt that same-sex couples should be able to enjoy the same rights, legally, as anybody else and so it was frustrating to me not to, I think, be able to square that with what were a whole bunch of religious sensitivities out there." He added that he thought civil unions were "a sufficient way of squaring the circle," but that "the pain and the sense of stigma that was being placed on same-sex couples who are friends of mine" changed his mind.

"I think the notion that somehow I was always in favor of marriage per se isn't quite accurate," Obama said, apparently referring to gay marriage.

He indicated his support for gay marriage in a 1996 questionnaire before backtracking years later. The president called that questionnaire "an example of struggling with what was a real issue at the time, which is, how do you make sure that people's rights are enjoyed and these religious sensitivities were taken into account?"

Obama disputes aide David Axelrod s take on gay marriage - Yahoo News

 

[JoeB131]

So what?

Frankly, it is a hard issue to struggle with. At the time, a lot of people weren't comfortable with it. Some still aren't.

Let's look at the other side of it, where Bush and Cheney rode that horse into the White House in 2004 promising to enshrine Homophobia into the Constitution, and never mind that Cheney's daughter is a lesbian, don't you dare point that out.

Of course, once they got into the White House, they completely dropped the subject and tried to privatize social security instead.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Can't say who a stranger on the other side of the country marries effects me in the least. Marry whoever the hell ya want, same sex, relatives, pets, inanimate objects, knock yourself out. I couldn't care less.