President Barack Obama is predicting that the Supreme Court will legalize same-sex marriage — now allowed in 37 states — once and for all this year.
Obama’s comments come after the nation’s high court refused to grant temporary delays to states that have had their laws restricting marriage to one man and one woman invalidated, sending a signal that justices are leaning in favor of allowing gay marriage in a ruling expected this June.
“My sense is that the Supreme Court is about to make a shift, one that I welcome, which is to recognize that — having hit a critical mass of states that have recognized same-sex marriage — it doesn’t make sense for us to now have this patchwork system,” Obama told BuzzFeed News on Tuesday.
“It’s time to recognize that under the equal protection clause of the United States [Constitution], same-sex couples should have the same rights as anybody else,” he said.
Obama’s comments come as his former adviser, David Axelrod, said the president had lied about his position on the issue because of political expedience.
Obama had actually supported it for years, Axelrod writes in his new book, “Believer: My Forty Years in Poltics,” released on Tuesday.
But Obama, Axelrod writes, opposed same-sex marriage during his 2008 presidential campaign and throughout most of his first term as President due to political concerns.
“Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage,” Axelrod writes. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.'”
Obama started saying in 2010 that his views were evolving on the issue and in May 2012 Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, citing “the evolution that I went through.”
But privately, Axelrod wrote that Obama made no secret of his support for same-sex marriage.
“I just don’t feel my marriage is somehow threatened by the gay couple next door,” Obama said, according to Axelrod’s book.
In the chapter, in which he notes the “recurring tension between Obama the idealist and Obama the politician,” Axelrod writes that Obama’s public stance didn’t seem to sit well with him.
“Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position,” Axelrod writes. “He routinely stumbled over the question when it came up in debates or interviews. ‘I’m just not very good at bulls—ting,’ he said with a sigh after one such awkward exchange.”
Axelrod’s book only confirms previous reports that Obama had, in fact, supported gay marriage for a long time.
While running for his first term in the Illinois State Senate, Obama signed a questionnaire in which he answered that he “favored legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” The questionnaire came to light in 2009, days before Obama’s inauguration.
“I had no doubt that this was his heartfelt belief,” Axelrod said of the questionnaire. “He also knew his view was way out in front of the public’s.”