I was going to write about how Barack Obama does not love America, at least according to Rudolph Giuliani. But I don’t want to indulge the rants of a politician desperate for a drop of attention. I’m not sure whether the former New York Mayor’s comments were racist, but I am sure that by insisting that Obama had a white mother, Giuliani’s defense was nothing more than the “some of my best friends are black” justification.
On to a more important topic: Obama is a liar.
Now that I believe. Not because of the cliché that all politicians are liars, and not even because of the reality that all people are liars sometimes. Rather, it’s because I never believed the President when he claimed that his views on gay marriage were “evolving.” I always suspected that he favored same-sex marriage. And sure enough, in his new book, Obama’s former top advisor David Axelrod confirms that the President had always supported equal rights.
Except, that’s not what Obama always said. In 2008, while campaigning for the presidency, he claimed that, as a Christian, he supported civil unions but not same-sex marriage. In Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, Axelrod reveals that he convinced Obama to tamper his real views to avoid losing the votes of churchgoers, particularly black ones.
Writes Axelrod:
“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.’”
Imagine that—a politician tweaking his views to gain votes. Oh, let’s just call it what it was: a lie.
On NationalReview.com, David Hrasanyi wants you to imagine a president whose position on abortion “evolves” after the election. And then imagine a former presidential adviser divulging that, hey, guess what? The president never actually believed in a woman’s right to choose. He was a pro-lifer all along, which explains why as president, he now pushes anti-abortion legislation.
Liberals would go mad, calling the president a flip-flopper. And rightly so.
But now let’s ask another question: What is wrong for Obama to lie about his political position on gay marriage? Well, you could argue that we should always denounce such deception. Or you might say, as Paul Waldman does on WashingtonPost.com, that the “more complicated way to look at it is to place it on a spectrum of misleading statements that politicians make all the time. When a candidate says, ‘I am so excited to be here in Dubuque!’ when he’d actually prefer to be back at home with his family, it’s certainly an intentional deception, but it’s one we accept and expect.” In this case, Obama’s misleading stance was acceptable.
Which makes Obama a coward.
“Absolutely,” agrees Waldman, who points out that Obama’s stance was “a spectacle of political cowardice.” Rather than lead on the issue of equal rights, Obama simply waited for public opinion to shift.
And maybe that’s OK, because who knows where this country would be on marriage equality had Obama not been so Machiavellian. What do you think? Do the ends justify the means in this case?
