Marriage Equality

robertreich.org — The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms. Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights. The Republican bedroom crowd doesn’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers. Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

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salon.com — Make no mistake: President Obama’s decision to publicly endorse gay marriage carries serious political risk, though also moral reward. Every state gay-marriage ban referendum has passed, except one in Arizona that was rewritten and adopted on a second try. And in swing states, from North Carolina to Nevada to Virginia, the president’s stance could cost him votes. That said, it was the right and necessary thing for the president to do. Future generations will look back and wonder what took him so long. The president believes in the saying attributed Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Despite his too-slow “evolution” on gay marriage, Obama knows the arc bends faster when we pull on it, and today he gave it a good tug.

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thedailybeast.com — In the immediate sense, it was apparently the comments by Joe Biden (and to a secondary extent Education Secretary Arne Duncan) that forced the president's hand, leading to his historic announcement in support of same-sex marriage. But in the deeper and more long-lasting sense, the movement made him do it. That's exactly how politics on the left is supposed to work. Franklin Roosevelt had the famous phrase: "Make me do it." He was speaking to activists for the labor movement or some other faction fighting for a slice of the pie, and he was saying to them, don't expect me to back you out of the kindess of my heart, even if in my heart I agree with you. This is politics, and you have to create the conditions that make it possible for me to support your cause. And that's what the LGBT movement did.

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prospect.org — Yesterday was obviously a great and historic moment for President Obama, who decided openly favor same-sex marriage. The effects are primarily symbolic, but it's still a good thing that he decided to match his excellent policy record on LBGT issues with the correct position on a crucial civil-rights issue. Obama embracing same-sex marriage was the right thing to do, and there's no reason to believe that it will be politically damaging. Presidential elections generally don't turn on social issues and it's hard to imagine that 2012 will be an exception.

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