“I think David is mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue,” Obama said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “I always felt that same-sex couples should be able to enjoy the same rights, legally, as anybody else, and so it was frustrating to me not to, I think, be able to square that with what were a whole bunch of religious sensitivities out there.”
Obama had previously supported civil unions for gay couples and explained Tuesday that he used to think that was “a sufficient way of squaring the circle.” But eventually, he told Buzzfeed on Tuesday, Obama changed his political position because of “the pain and the sense of stigma that was being placed on same-sex couples who are friends” of his.
But in his book, “Believer: My Forty Years in Poltics,” Axelrod suggests politics played a bigger role in Obama’s public position on the issue throughout his first presidential campaign and into the first term of his presidency.
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“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 said in the BuzzFeed News interview.
“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.
