President Obama's announcement this week in an ABC New interview that he personally favors marriage equality is one of the most courageous statements any major politician has made in some time. It is reminiscent of President Kennedy's statement on civil rights in 1963, when JFK's introduction of a strong civil rights bill threatened to cost him the votes of a Southern electorate that was still voting Democratic at the time.
This week's lopsided vote in favor of marriage restrictions in North Carolina underscores the political risk President Obama is taking. While current Gallup polling shows support for marriage equality is now nationally in the majority for the first time (51% to 48%), it is quite likely to hurt the President in some swing states in the fall. You can't forget that the presidential election is not a national poll but 51 separate winner-take-all elections held in the states and the District of Columbia. Obama only won North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, and the margin in favor of the North Carolina measure to ban same-sex marriage was greater than twenty percent.
The President's statement is anything but what a calculating politician would have done. Such an operator would have stuck with the safe bet and kept his views muddled, not wanting to alienate those opposed to gay rights in battleground states.
Instead, he staked out a position in keeping with the groundbreaking figure he is: the first African-American President, the exemplar of the nation's progress along the path of overcoming bigotry by race, is now on record as the first to publicly stand against bigotry by sexual orientation. May 9, 2012 will go down as one of those important dates in American history, when a President took a stand against the last legalized discrimination remaining in the fabric of American society. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted, no major extension of rights proposed by any American president has failed to eventually be enacted. Though it may take some time, I do not expect this to be an exception.
I don't mind admitting my gratitude as a history teacher to have personally seen, as a child, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and as an adult the election of our first black president and the first presidential enunciation of true equality for LGBT citizens. There is no doubt in my mind that the day will come when people will scratch their heads that there ever was a controversy over equality for gays, much as younger people today are perplexed that there ever was a controversy over equality by race.
I am proud of our president today, regardless of how this plays out electorally. He has done that which is the right thing to do, and having done so places Barack Obama for all time on the right side of human rights and of history itself on this groundbreaking issue.
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