Out in the Open

Today President Obama publicly affirmed his support for same-sex marriage.  His position has been an open secret for some time.

Although the president has equivocated in public his support for it since the 2008 election, saying then and since that his view was "evolving," he affirmed support for same-sex marriage officially back in 1996 as a candidate for the Illinois state senate.

Many supporters of same-sex marriage believed that Mr. Obama's stance in 2008 was a betrayal of his previously stated civil rights conviction based on political opportunism.  Others, specifically those opposed to defining "marriage" in terms of same-sex couples and granting concomitant legal status to them, saw Mr. Obama's stance as deceptive and disingenuous but agreed that it was motivated by political opportunism.

The president may have been compelled to come out now (again) publicly in favor of same-sex marriage because of Vice President Biden's apparent (although perhaps strategic) gaffe on the subject over the weekend.  The vote in favor of North Carolina's Amendment 1 yesterday, which confirmed the legal definition of "marriage" as a relational union between heterosexual couples, also provided a convenient opportunity for him.  Today's disclosure follows somewhat naturally on the heels of the executive branch's decision in February not to execute federal legislation in the form of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, despite filing briefs in 2009 and 2011 defending the law and affirming the obligation of the Justice Department to defend all federal laws.  No one, however doubts the election-related timing of this announcement.  (Mr. Obama officially launched his re-election campaign this past weekend.)

Whatever one's view on the matter of same-sex marriage may be (and I may have some things to say in future posts), the president's announcement seems to confirm in a key respect the musings I shared on Monday in my "Moral Julia" post.

In that post, I connected Mr. Obama's policy vision slideshow "The Life of Julia," via a New York Times op-ed by Ross Douthat, with the thesis of George Lakoff's book Moral Politics.  Mr. Douthat's suggestion, which I think makes sense particularly in light of Professor Lakoff's moral-political models, is that the president's use of the figure Julia sets a trajectory for redefining the government's relation to the individual (namely, as its family).

I had suggested, also based on Mr. Lakoff's work, that the "flexibility" that Mr. Obama seems poised to use post-election in negotiations with Russia over missile defense might extend beyond foreign defense policy to conceptions of the family and other policy issues.  The depiction of Julia redefines the prevailing family structure in the federal policy vision, and so does the president's endorsement of the legalization at the federal level of same-sex marriage.

Some will cheer the president's announcement; others will jeer.  But today Mr. Obama confirmed quite clearly our main idea:  the liberal egalitarian trajectory that the president will likely pursue in any second term will be one that seeks to advance his version of liberalism boldly where it has not yet fully gone at the federal level, including on moral and family matters.

Where I was somewhat off the mark is in intimating that the president might wait to pursue these trajectories until after the election when voter reaction might be less dangerous politically to him.  He may still do that on other matters, for instance, on foreign policy and missile defense.  But according to whatever political calculus prevailed among him and his advisers, he did not do that on this issue.  Voters now have his unconcealed opinion before them.  That is salutary for the election process.

It is not often that we get to add such a mark so quickly to the prescience scorecard.  Here the outcome is mixed:  right forecast in substance, wrong in timing.  Nevertheless, we're still taking the opportunity today to pat ourselves on the analytical forecasting back.  Even with only mixed success, some of us need all the encouraging affirmation we can muster.