Obama's Wobbly Stance on Gay Marriage Irks Left

(Aug. 23) -- Nearly a month after California's Proposition 8 was struck down in federal court, the state of same-sex marriage on a national level has scarcely been dicier. Over at The New Republic, for instance, James Downie has assembled a timeline of President Barack Obama's statements on gay marriage dating back to 1996.

What they reveal, says Executive Editor Richard Just -- in a scathing post put up on Monday-- is an "evasive stance on a controversial civil rights issue from a liberal president; an insistence that the issue is primarily local, rather than national, in character; a complete failure of sincerity, nerve, and will."

Just continues:

What the timeline shows is a pattern that can only be described as illogical and cynical. Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: "I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you're playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.") Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution.

And though he may be the most forceful in condemning the president's tacit avoidance of the issue at hand, Just is far from the only writer to note what appears to be a strange inversion of American pols as of late. As the Washington Blade's Jessica Lee wrote just days earlier:

On the Sunday morning news shows the weekend after the Prop 8 ruling, the White House rolled out David Axelrod to explain Obama's position on the issue. Axe twisted into a pretzel. ...

There is an inconvenient truth in this for the gay left: conservatives have taken the leadership role in achieving marriage equality and have achieved the most important success so far as they are the most willing and most able to take the case to the Supreme Court.

Interestingly, all of this discussion follows on the heels of a new poll taken by CNN that reveals that for the first time, a majority of the country -- 52 percent -- believes that gay couples should have the right to marry.

Read more at The New Republic and the Washington Blade.