Bench Memos

He’s Against It, Except That He’s For It

“He” is Barack Obama, and “it” is gay marriage.  Here he is talking to MTV about Proposition 8 in California:

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about.

I hadn’t noticed Prop 8 having anything to say about telling people not to care about one another.  Has Barack Obama noticed that the California Supreme Court has created the “right” to gay marriage that he tells us he’s “not in favor of”?  All that Prop 8 would do is reverse that ruling, and restore Obama’s declared policy preference.

There’s only one conclusion from Obama’s own words: what he says he wants and what he really wants are direct opposites.  By opposing the only step available to preserve the policy he says he wants, he reveals that he in fact wants the opposite policy.  Who now can doubt that Barack Obama is in favor of gay marriage?

Matthew J. Franck is a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, a contributing editor of Public Discourse, and professor emeritus of political science at Radford University.
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