President Obama and Gay Marriage

President Obama came out today and, after years of... well, the word I'm looking for is "lying," he announced what everyone already knew, namely, that he is pro-gay marriage.   It's an article of faith among the left-wing elites that populate New York, Hollywood and Washington, as well as academia and the non-profit world, that gay marriage is a civil right, and that refusing to grant gay men and women the right to marry is akin to Jim Crow or slavery.   So why would Obama, a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, not agree?   Of course he would, and he always did, he just never admitted it until now.

Why now?   Because Joe Biden and others in the administration "outed" him last week by coming out in favor of gay marriage.   Either they were wrong and he'd have to say so, or they were right and he'd have to recant his earlier opposition to gay marriage.   Either way, he had to do something.

Well, maybe.   But it's probably more likely that his money sources in the big New York investment banks have dried up, and he's going to have to hit money sources in Hollywood and the entertainment industry if he's going to compete in the fall.   And that means going hard pro-gay.  

Weirdly, his opposition to gay marriage was driven by political calculation and cynicism.   And his support of gay marriage is too.   (Or maybe that's not so weird, given the species of political animal Obama is.)

All that being said, the Regular Guy holds no brief one way or the other, frankly.   As a Catholic I am committed to marriage between a man and a woman raising children as the ideal family configuration.   It works.   But as a semi-libertarian I also don't care what other people do, and I'm unwilling to go to the mattresses to keep two men or two women from arranging their lives in the way they choose.   With divorce rates at 50% and unwed motherhood approaching 30% overall (and 70% in the black community), we simply have bigger fish to fry in terms of re-establishing the father-mother-children-dog family as the model for a functional society.

But there is one weird thing about President Obama's announcement.   I've looked to find the actual text of this, but here is what ABC reports he said:  "The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states' deciding the issue on their own."

Hmmmm... a controversial issue involving people's deeply held, personal beliefs about marriage, certainly something that cuts to the core of how we define ourselves, something akin to sexuality or child-rearing... hmmm, sounds a lot like the abortion issue, doesn't it?   So why does the President think that states can decide whether to sanction gay marriage or not, but he doesn't think states should decide whether to sanction abortion or not?   The position is logically untenable.

But, then, so much of the fluent BS that flows from our verbally diarrhetic President is logically untenable.