Bruce Thornton On May 10, 2012
In
yet another act of election-year cynicism, Barack Obama has just
announced, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
This statement follows similar pronouncements by Joe Biden and Education
Secretary Arne Duncan. To hear Obama tell it, this change reflects his
“evolution” away from his previously stated position, which he made
clear in 2008 a few days before the election: “I believe marriage is
between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.” That same
year he told Reverend Rick Warren that marriage is a “union between a
man and a woman,” adding that it is a “sacred union” with “God in the
mix.” Both statements contradicted what he had told a Chicago gay
newspaper in 1996 while running for the Illinois state senate: “I favor
legalizing same-sex marriage.” No wonder this year’s electoral
conversion smells suspicious even to Obama cheerleader MSNBC, which on
its First Read blog brushed past the personal “evolution” pretext and
zeroed in on the political calculus: “Obama’s shift not only speaks to a
broad swath of the electorate, which has exhibited increasing
acceptance of same-sex marriage in opinion polls, but also gay and
lesbian voters who compose a core part of Obama’s base, and have been
major fundraisers for his re-election.”
This latest about-face, then, clearly shows that Obama’s 2008
opposition to gay marriage was devised to make him appear a centrist
during the presidential election, and that now he believes he can speak
honestly and shore up his progressive base.
hat Obama would say one thing while believing another is well
established by his long track record of shifting his policy positions
depending on whether he is pandering to the center or the left––consider
extraordinary renditions, military tribunals, Guantanamo, or the surge
in Iraq, all of which he vociferously opposed until he supported them.
Some might think that he is a rank opportunist who believes in none of
these positions, his public statements based on tactical calculations
reflecting polls and political necessity. Remember his principled
opposition to the evil Bush tax cuts, which he then extended a month
after the 2010 electoral “shellacking,” as he called it?
But consideration of the world from which Obama emerged points us to
what he really thinks. It beggars belief to think someone who has spent
his whole adult life in the progressive purlieus of academe and
community activism, where gay marriage, like abortion, is a sacrament,
could sincerely be opposed to it. Like taxing the greedy rich, America’s
foreign policy sins, endemic white racism, redistributionist economics,
global warming, the evils of carbon-based energy, deficit spending,
conservative misogynism, and all the other scriptures in the progressive
psalter, the rightness and justness of gay marriage are revealed truths
that require obedience, not justification.
Indeed, gay marriage is particularly expressive of the progressive
gospel, for this issue concentrates all that sect’s fundamentalist
doctrines. First, it exemplifies the progressive idea that the
traditional wisdom and beliefs of the masses are benighted remnants of
their ignorant, superstitious past from which we should be evolving. The
collective wisdom of the human race developed over centuries is
automatically suspect and to be rejected as irrational justifications
for oppression, exclusion, and the defense of unfair privilege.
Progressive moderns, supposedly armed with advances in knowledge
discovered by the “human sciences,” are better able to arrange society
and human relations so that they reflect the reality hidden to our
religion-addled ancestors, and thus can ensure justice and equality. So
the belief based on faith, tradition, and natural law that marriage is
an institution joining a man and woman is to be rejected, and society to
be reshaped according to the truths possessed by enlightened
progressives.
Next, gay marriage is an important component of the identity politics
that dominate the liberal university. Like the other so-called minority
victims of historical prejudice, oppression, and exclusion, homosexuals
are owed affirmation and reparations in the form of faculty positions,
gay-centric takes on traditional disciplines like history or English,
and their own departments, majors, minors, or programs. Outside the
university, laws and behavior uncongenial to the gay agenda must be
fought through the courts and the federal government. To work, though,
grievance politics requires grievances, for no matter how successful or
powerful a victim-group is, no matter how much progress is made in
eliminating prejudice or exclusion from institutions and laws, the group
must still find an injustice to fight in order to justify its existence
and privileges. For the gay lobby, traditional marriage is the most
important target, for it is passionately supported by those
constituencies, especially conservatives and people of faith, who stand
in the way of the progressives’ agenda of reshaping society and human
nature according to their utopian ideology.
Finally, legalizing gay marriage necessarily requires empowering
anti-democratic federal bureaucrats and judges in order to override the
stubborn ignorance and bigotry of the people. Whatever polls might say
about increasing support for gay marriage, its proponents aren’t about
to put the question to the people’s vote. Remember California’s
Proposition 8, which in 2008, the same year Obama overwhelmingly won
California, defined marriage in the state constitution as solely between
a man and a woman? It passed in this progressive bastion, to be
overturned later by the State Supreme Court. Progressives prefer to
achieve their aims not through democratic elections that reflect the
will of the people, but through unelected judges and bureaucrats who
share the progressive world-view that the people need to be coerced into
believing so they’ll do the right thing. Obama’s current flip-flop on
gay marriage is another sign of his preference for using coercive
federal power to bypass the will of the states, where such highly
contested social issues should be adjudicated through the democratic
process.
Obama, of course, for three years has been regularly using
presidential power to bypass the people in order to shape policy.
Marriage laws may be the purview of the states, but don’t think that
that cannot change. Remember, Obama ordered the Department of Justice
not to defend the democratically passed Defense of Marriage Act, which
was passed in part to protect the integrity of state laws. He also has
gone on record as saying the issue will ultimately be determined by the
Supreme Court, one or more of whose justices the next president will
most likely choose. It’s not unthinkable that some future Supreme Court
will find the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and override the
32 state laws defending traditional marriage.
Given how thoroughly the issue of gay marriage expresses the
foundational progressive beliefs that define the university and that
underlie most of Obama’s policies, it strains credulity to think that
support for gay marriage hasn’t been Obama’s actual position all along.
Like his breakout 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention in
which be proclaimed, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative
America––there is the United States of America,” his support for
traditional marriage was just one more patch of camouflage hiding his
progressive agenda.
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