Obama's (and the country's) changing opinion on gay marriage

In a recently released political memoir, a former aide to President Barack Obama said the president always supported same-sex marriage, despite what he said in his 2008 campaign. David Axelrod, author of Believer, wrote that Obama “grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me and modified his position to support civil unions [instead of] marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.’”

Midway through his tenure, Obama announced he supported same-sex marriage. Last week, I talked with John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview about the president’s about-face that really wasn’t.

“Here you have a blatant lie to the American people that’s been revealed. No one really is making a big deal about it except maybe you or I,” Stonestreet said. “This reflects a cultural problem. … Personal integrity and things like that are just not highly valued in the political process.”

The Axelrod book came out one day after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block a federal judge’s ruling that struck down Alabama’s marriage law and ordered judges in that state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples who request them.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said his colleagues’ unwillingness to block the ruling from taking effect was a bad sign for traditional marriage. The high court is still several weeks away from considering the marriage question one more time, but Thomas said the other justices might have tipped their hand.

In the meantime, some have compared Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s defense of the state’s marriage law to how Alabama responded to forced integration of schools.

“It’s s almost like the [equating] of the LGBT movement with the Civil Rights movement is complete with this story,” Stonestreet said. He compared the advent of same-sex marriage with the rise of no-fault divorce in the United States.

“The instability of marriage overall in society is the overwhelming trend, and it’s not good for children,” he said, adding later, “the legality of same-sex marriage will be a school teacher. [Same-sex marriages] will teach us new ways to do families and they won’t be good ones.”

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