Uh-Oh. Obama on Same Sex Marriage+
I guess I shouldn’t be to suprised. After all, I started noticing over on Obama Blog that language on gay & lesbian equality was either missing or hard to find. I noticed one commenter there consistently pointed out the disappearance of that language and was witholding his support until he knew why it had gone.
The reason seems clear now. The Democratic party’s “great black hope” has to walk a tightrope on gay & lesbian equality, or at least thinks he does, if he wants to win.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama said Friday that his Christian beliefs dictated that marriage should be between a man and a woman, although he supports civil unions that give legal rights to gay and lesbian couples.
Republican candidate Alan Keyes accused Obama of trying to have it both ways on the issue.
“I think what we are seeing on this issue is deceit,” said Keyes, who has made his opposition to gay marriage a cornerstone of his campaign. “He is deceiving the voters.”
Throughout the campaign, Obama has said that he opposes gay marriage but is in favor of civil unions. During a taping of WBBM-AM’s “At Issue,” he was asked his personal views on gay marriage.
“I’m a Christian, and so although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman,” Obama said.
But the Democratic state senator added that he did not understand people who say gay marriage somehow threatens the sanctity of marriage as an institution.
First, EMILY’S List backs a supporter of the FMA, now this. What’s a good, gay progressive to think?
This is probably the only time I’ll ever say this, but I kinda think Alan Keyes is right on this one. Obama, not unlike Kerry, may indeed be trying to have it both ways here; keeping the gay & progressive vote while not alienating more conservative Democratic voters who can’t accept the idea of same sex marriage on par with heterosexual marriage. Of course, I don’t live in Illinois, so I won’t have the opportunity to vote for or against him. I will, however, be voting for Kerry, whose “marriage-by-any-other-name-is-still-marriage” approach of sticking another label on it for the sake of people’s comfort, Obama is borrowing here.
I try to be a realist. I know that Kerry to some degree is saying what he has to say—or what he thinks he has to—in order to get elected. Just like saying he would still go into Iraq, even knowing what he knows today, he has to say he’s opposed to gay marriage in order to remain electable. Given the numbers on the issue, that’s pretty much true. Like I say, I try to be a reaslist, but for some reason I still end up feeling let down.
In the past I’ve said that as long as civil unions would give my family the same rights and protections as any other family, I don’t care what they’re called. But right now I’m feeling a little tired of the “no marriage, but civil unions” approach. It’s like being handed a consolation prize and being told “You can’t have that, but here’s this.” The part of me that tries to be a realist also tries to consider that the consolation prize of civil unions is better than nothing, better than no rights or protections at all.
It leaves me wondering just what we—gay and lesbian Americans—when we make deals like this. What do we gain when we support a candidate who supports making us and our families second glass citizens, or when we support an organization that suppoorts her? What do we gain if we hold our noses and do so, simply because it means one less Republican vote in the Senate and one more Democratic vote, even though we know that candidate will vote against us and our families when it’s our issue’s (same sex marriages) turn in the hopper? What do we gain when we support a candidate who would deny our equality under the law with one hand, and with the other offer us something “close”?
What do we gain when we support candidates, organizations, and political parties that do not fully support us? More importantly, what do we lose, on both the tangible and intagible levels?
Or is it just that all the viable choices of the moment are rotten ones, and some are just slightly less rotten than the others?
September 25th, 2004 at 10:58 pm
It might have been easier for him (since he’s supposed to be the great liberal hope) to just say what his gay and more liberal supporters would want him to say. But, I think he was just trying to be honest with people about what his personal thoughts on the subject were and not pander when it comes to his personal opinions.
I don’t think it was part of a political calculus because he is up 45 pts. in the polls. At this point, he could go on live television and perform a gay marriage ceremony, perform an abortion, smoke some weed, and still beat Keys by 20 - 30 pts.
He really doesn’t need to gain anything from this statement politically, and most Americans, esp. African-Americans agree with this point of view. In fact, even though people want to draw parallels between the civil rights struggle and the gay rights struggle, most Black folks I talk to, resent it when such comparisons are made and they don’t see it as the same thing. They may be wrong, but that’s the way they feel about it.
The religious right people like Alan Keyes know that this is a losing issue with Black voters. That’s why they keep harping on it. This issue could potentially cost the Democratic party more Black votes than even abortion. They won’t go out and start voting for Republicans, they just won’t show up for Democratic candidates and that’s all the Republicans really want.
If Obama is a religious person, and his personal views are shaped by his religion, and his religion dictates that marriage is between a man and a woman, then this is just him being truthful about his personal views and that is afterall what the reporter asked him. Not what he thought policy should be, but his personal point of view.
September 27th, 2004 at 6:47 pm
On a related note, a blogger has discovered that Alan Keyes daughter is gay and blogs about it. Farkers have been kind enough to mirror the now-yanked pictures in the Fark forums.