In May 2012, Newsweek crowned Barack Obama “the first gay president” for his war on marriage. A halo appeared above his head in the cover photo. The magazine was applauding him not only for his defiance of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) but for his “evolution” in favor of gay marriage, a stance no president before him had ever taken.
This flattering narrative about his brave and anguished transformation was bogus. He had endorsed gay marriage many years before. “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight any effort to prohibit such marriage,” he wrote in reply to a 1996 issues survey from a gay magazine based on Chicago’s North Side. When this became public and threatened to cause him political damage as a state Senate candidate, his aides cast the answer as a garbled misfire. It wasn’t. He had signed the letter himself.
His opposition to gay marriage was always a charade. In 2008, he faked up nominal opposition to it in order to win the White House, all the while intending to defy DOMA and redefine marriage. As soon as he entered office, he began holding “LGBT” receptions in the White House, telling gay activists that Americans would lose their “worn arguments and old attitudes” under his juggernaut. “Welcome to your White House,” he said. “We’ve been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.”
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It is hard to imagine a more aggressively anti-marriage administration. In his first term, he undercut DOMA at every turn, dispensing federal benefits to same-sex couples (which includes time off to take care of “children not related by blood or adoption”) , authorizing gay nuptials at military bases, and ordering the Justice Department to cast a blind eye to it all. Meanwhile, many of his agencies, no matter how lowly, operated as propaganda mills for gay marriage. The Department of Agriculture, of all places, held seminars on “heterosexism,” instructing federal employees that opposition to gay marriage is no different than racism.
For his Department of Education, he named as “Safe Schools Czar” a homosexual activist, Kevin Jennings, who had written the foreword to a book titled Queering Elementary Education. Not long thereafter, the Department of Education boasted its first “LGBT Youth Summit,” at which plans were formed for spreading gay activism to schools across the country. “Your federal government has finally come out of the closet in support of LGBT youth,” burbled one official. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius denounced “homophobes” and promised to LGBT youth, “I want to tell you, you have a friend in this administration, who will stand beside you each and every step along the way.”
The promotion of gay marriage hasn’t even been restricted to our own borders. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton announced in 2011 that urging countries to adopt gay rights formed a “priority” of American foreign policy. She instructed diplomats to operate like gay rights activists abroad, outfitting them with a “toolkit” designed to teach them how to dispel the notion that such lifestyle choices as gay marriage and sex-change operations are merely “Western” phenomena.
When it comes to marriage, Obama respects neither natural law nor even positive law. What God and Congress have joined together, he feels free to put asunder.
“In practice they can just look the other way. But this is not the way our government was intended to work,” House Speaker John Boehner has said. Indeed, America’s Founding Fathers would have regarded Obama’s open defiance of DOMA as a tyrannical act. In his inaugural oath, he promised to uphold the law. On DOMA, he is actively subverting it.
Last week, his Justice Department filed a brief with the Supreme Court, urging it to discard DOMA on the grounds that the law violates the “fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection.” This is the chimerical catch-all phrase of liberals who want to ignore justly enacted laws and smuggle their ideology into the Constitution.
The spectacle of the federal government filing briefs against federal laws (in this case, a law signed by Bill Clinton) is ridiculous. The Justice Department exists to enforce the law, not to serve as pro bono counsel for gay activists who seek to violate it.
Even as he blatantly puts the resources of the Justice Department at the service of gay marriage, he claims that his support for it is only “personal” and that he considers it a “state” matter. But if it is an issue for the people to decide at the state level, why did he just announce that he is considering a legal brief against California’s Proposition 8? He doesn’t even bother to coordinate his con jobs at this point.
Even if his Justice Department doesn’t file that brief, the fact that he publicly contemplated it shows his previous statements are meaningless. Obviously, he wants to nationalize gay marriage and prevent states from banning it. Should he get the chance to appoint one or two more justices to the Supreme Court, a national right to gay marriage, which they will conveniently discover within the “penumbras” of the text, is guaranteed.
Obama can’t rest until those “worn arguments and old attitudes” have disappeared from coast to coast and society’s preeminent moral institution morphs into an immoral one.