On Wednesday afternoon during an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, President Barack Obama once again made history by becoming the first sitting president to publicly endorse gay marriage. According to The New York Times and numerous online commentators, Obama and his advisors had planned to make the announcement in the lead-up to the September convention since earlier this year but accelerated that timeline in the past week because of Vice President Joe Biden and other cabinet members’ recent public support for the issue. The question now left to many supporters of gay rights is how to interpret the president’s move — asking whether it was a calculated political maneuver that will have little to no effect or a heroic statement sacrificing political gain for, simply put, doing the right thing.
Soon after the news broke on Wednesday, an article describing Obama’s statement — “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” — was emailed out to my fraternity by a gay member, celebrating the move and Obama’s support. Though I don’t really have any plans to marry another guy myself and could never fully understand the power behind the president’s historic support of the issue, I was pretty excited. So, as any good liberal, middle-class white boy would do, I went to post the article on my Facebook with an exclamation mark — that is, until I saw the next email.
Another gay member responded by saying he couldn’t understand the uproar on Facebook and in the news, that Obama saying he personally thinks it should be legal doesn’t make it any closer to happening. More arguments followed — that the statement was a “political stunt,” and, through Obama’s essentially federalist outlook on the issue, it did more to entrench continued homophobic state policy in some southern states and elsewhere than anything else. At a basic level, someone concluded, celebrating Obama was tantamount to congratulating someone for not being homophobic, a viewpoint that should be a given rather than celebrated.
The blogosphere largely echoed these two standpoints in the hours and days after the president’s interview. Meghan McCain wrote in a column for The Daily Beast that “talk is cheap” — unless it accompanies actual support for legislation, Obama’s statement doesn’t mean much at all. On The Agitator, another blogger wrote of Obama’s statement that it’s “about f*cking time,” saying that it may have been a position the president had supported all along, but that he “didn’t have the political spine” to state it until after “carefully strategizing with his aides to make sure it wouldn’t damage him politically.” Others, of course, celebrated the move, telling the activist left to essentially shut it, as Obama “may have just kissed off a few swing states — and in the kick-off to a presidential re-election campaign, it doesn’t get any gutsier than that.”
If you want progress for equal rights, you have to accept Obama’s strategy as politically motivated, but also necessary for increasing the rate of progress in a realistic way. Although his statement will most likely solidify social conservatives against him, I think it will ultimately help him win the election against a man who would put gay rights backward 40 years.
Take P.M. Carpenter’s summary of this strategy on his blog. By making it an election issue, Obama is forcing Romney to defend his opposition to civil unions and goal of outlawing gay marriage nationwide. Civil unions are supported by a majority of the country, and outlawing gay marriage at the federal level is a far cry from level-headed conservative, federalist values. Obama, on the other hand, can say that it was his own personal opinion, and, unlike Romney, he isn’t infringing upon states’ rights. And the best suggestion from this post: Obama could say, “My position is no different from Dick Cheney’s. Is he outside the mainstream?”
A president will always be politically motivated to win elections. But here we have a political calculation that includes letting gay people across the world know that the leader of the most powerful country in the world supports them openly — a move that will arguably help the man win an election. And after that, who knows? Yes, it was calculating. But yes, it was awesome. It is not an ideal world, but we’re getting closer. And this move takes us farther along that path.