Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s Evolution


Yesterday, Barack Obama came out of the closet and acknowledged what we’d all suspected for a long, long time: he supports extending the civil recognition of marriage to same-sex couples. As you might expect, this has been hailed as a bold and risky and courageous move even though, as the chart above demonstrates, Obama is following public opinion, not leading it. His own position, he says, has “evolved” and he’s been mocked for putting the matter in those terms even though, as the chart shows again, the US population as a whole has “evolved” in pretty much the same way.

Of course, it’s probable that Obama has long-supported gay-marriage but has only recently been able to say so. Moreover, the extent f his commitment to it should not be exagerrated: he supports gay-marriage but believes it should be a matter for the individual states, not the federal government. Which means, in effect, that he doesn’t support gay-marriage as strongly as he supports almost everything else he believes in. An outbreak of Federalism! Whatever next?

Plainly, since 31 states have passed laws outlawing same-sex unions, Obama’s position recognises the limits of what is politically feasible. And yet this is more than simply a question of pleasing a Democratic base that, in large part (though with some significant exceptions) was beginning to wonder when the President would come clean and catch-up with mainstream liberal thinking. As David Frum points out, it positions the Democratic party as the party of America’s future:

[I]t locks in place for another generation the Brand ID of Democrats as the party of cultural modernity. This Brand ID fits uneasily upon the Democrats, for they are also the party of ethnic minorities and recent immigrants. With the president’s statement, however, the modernists have gained the clear upper hand.

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