Obama Was for Gay Marriage Before He was Against It

I've argued a couple of times that Barack Obama will capitulate in due time to the hard-left's demands for gay marriage rights. Obama's official "Change" website features the most comprehensive homosexual rights platform of any incoming presidential administration, and while Obama has argued against same-sex marriage while campaigning, by ideology and inclination he's favorably disposed to the gay marriage agenda.

It's no surprise, then, that the news this morning features a number of stories highlighting Obama's past endorsement of full-blown homosexual marriage rights:

In 1996, during his run for Illinois state Senate, Obama offered a progressive gay rights agenda, which is outlined in the memo above in a response to queries from the now-defunct newspaper, Outlines. The Windy City Times, the paper's successor, has the full story, "Obama Changed Views on Gay Marriage" (see also Ben Smith's report).

The Windy City Times claims that it searched its hard-copy archives for the "missing" questionnaires of the Chicago-area candidate positions for that year's elections. In the case of Obama, with the documents just now coming to light, this could be one of the most momentous bait-and-switch operations in American history.

I argued earlier that at some point, given Obama's language of tolerance and his inherent style of finessing the issues, we'd see a push for gay marriage under a new Democratic administration, starting with the repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law the relieves states of official recognition of the gay marriages of citizens of another state. As I argued:

The DOMA says that the federal government will not recogize same-sex marriages as coequal to traditional marriages, and it holds that states need not recognize same-sex marriages that have been lawfully authorized by legislatures of other states.

Should the Obama administration repeal DOMA, the gay marriage movement will become legitimized under a creeping federalism of No on H8 intolerance, as more and more states recognize same-sex weddings across the nation - that is, an Obama administration will give the green light to the destruction of this country's traditionalism by legitimizing claims to homosexual marriage equality.

This would be a huge step toward consolidating a national religion of secular humanism at the federal level of American government and politics. Indeed, this is exactly the outcome demanded by radical same-sex activists. We will see a new national polity built on an ideology of cultural relativism, no longer that great shining City on a Hill, but just one more run-of-the-mill postmaterialist industrial state with an anything-goes program of amoralism nationalism.

Here again, are the stake before us ...

It's only a matter of time before we see Barack Obama shift his position back to favoring the gay marriage agenda. Whether this begins with DOMA or with legal challenges to gay marriage bans in the states, my sense is that Obama's early statements on homosexual rights reflect his core beliefs, and he'll use his office to advance that agenda as a matter of personal principle. Strategically, he might delay this step until after reelection in 2012, but a first-term repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" could set the tone at the federal level for a major public relations campaign by the Obama administration in the years ahead.