Obama v. marriage

What's the biggest secret in the United States today? It can't be the number of nuclear warheads we hold. President Obama has already spilled the beans on that one. It's 5,113. He told the world. And it's not the identity of SEAL Team Six as the strike force that took down Osama bin Laden. Vice President Joe Biden blurted that one out just days after everyone agreed not to do so.

The biggest secret-if you believe the media-is President Obama's real position on marriage. To the press it's some really big mystery. Why so? For as long as Barack Obama has been in public life, going back to his days as an Illinois state senator, he has opposed every effort to defend marriage. He opposed the federal marriage amendment to the Constitution. He opposed the federal Defense of Marriage Act (and has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder not to defend it in court). He opposed California's Proposition 8. He opposed Iowa's vote to remove state Supreme Court justices who overturned marriage there. He opposed North Carolina's Amendment One. He opposes a similar effort in Maryland.

Marriage has been under sustained assault for more than 20 years, and Barack Obama has never supported a single effort to protect it. So why the big mystery?

It's because President Obama now realizes that black Americans and Hispanic Americans overwhelmingly do not agree that marriage should be ended. He knows that pro-marriage voters are the key to carrying such critical states as Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado this fall.

Why do I refer to the issue as "ending marriage"? Just consider what Biden told Meet the Press on Sunday:

"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that."

Given this rationale, how can Biden say no to three men marrying? Two men and a woman? If everyone can marry, then no one can marry, thus ending marriage as we know it.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been working to end marriage for years. He told an overflow crowd at the Newseum three years ago, "They say gay marriage will lead to polygamy. I'm for that!" The audience of liberal grad students, congressional staffers, court clerks, and journalists cheered wildly in response.

Turley has thought through the marriage issue better than Joe Biden has. That's not surprising. Turley knows constitutional law; Biden knows Will and Grace. Perhaps next year, the veep will see reruns of HBO's Big Love and decide he's OK with polygamy, too.

Americans need to realize that marriage itself is at issue in this country. And Biden's mental meanderings should not obscure the issue. His same-sex miasma doesn't conceal this blazingly obvious fact: This is an anti-marriage administration. Every policy it has pursued is anti-marriage.

President Obama says his position is "evolving." Whether he wins in November or loses, he will emerge on the day after Election Day as a full-blown advocate of abolishing marriage.