Wedding crasher: No, Biden hasn’t supported gay marriage ‘throughout his career’ – Washington Examiner
As Senate Democrats contemplate whether they want to codify same-sex marriage or keep it as a campaign issue in the midterm elections, a bit of revisionist history emerged from the White House.
Of course, President Joe Biden supports the Respect for Marriage Act, his spokeswoman said. He has always been on this side of history!
“[T]his is something that he supports — this piece of legislation,” Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at Wednesday’s White House press briefing. “And this is an issue, when it comes to marriage equality, that he has supported through — through his Senate days and as VP and now as president.”
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Jean-Pierre reiterated during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One on Friday that on “the same-sex marriage bill or same-sex marriage just more broadly,” Biden “was very clear as a vice president, certainly throughout his career.”
Now, the fact that Biden’s political career began more than a half-century ago ought to tell you this probably isn’t true. He arrived in the Senate in 1973, and the definition of marriage as the union between a man and a woman was not a seriously contested legal or political question for another 20 years.
But when that day finally arrived, Biden instantly became “a leading advocate, a leading voice,” as Jean-Pierre described him, for “marriage equality,” right?
Not really. Congress responded to the first state court rulings in favor of same-sex marriage by passing the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. This defined marriage as a union of one man and one woman for federal purposes and allowed states to withhold recognition of other definitions of marriage without being seen as running afoul of the Constitution’s full faith and credit clause.
Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which came during “his career” and “through his Senate days.”
Again, none of this should be surprising. This federal gay marriage ban passed the Senate by a vote of 85 to 14. The House vote for its enactment was 342 to 65. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law. A Gallup poll taken that year found only 27% supported same-sex marriage, while 68% were opposed.
Biden was acting in accordance with an adage Jean-Pierre would coin just this month. “When you are not with where a majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme,” she told reporters at a briefing. “That is an extreme way of thinking.”
Nobody was going to accuse ol’ Scranton Joe of that.
It is fair to say that Biden balked at some manifestations of opposition to same-sex marriage, including constitutional amendments to that effect. He voted to filibuster (yes, filibuster) the federal marriage amendment in 2004. Cloture on that measure failed 48-50.
But it is equally true that Biden did not support same-sex marriage a single day of his 36-year Senate career. In fact, Biden cited the Defense of Marriage Act as a reason to oppose a constitutional amendment.
“Nobody’s violated that law. There’s been no challenge to that law. Why do we need a constitutional amendment?” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2006. “Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Two years later, Biden was the Democratic nominee for vice president. And there he was on the stage with Sarah Palin, saying he opposed “redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage.” None of the top-tier candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination that year supported gay marriage, including Biden’s soon-to-be boss Barack Obama.
It wasn’t until May 2012, in another Meet the Press interview while running for reelection as vice president, that Biden expressed support for same-sex marriage. “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” he said.
The tension this caused with Obama, who had not yet announced his own reversal on the issue, has been in the news recently with the publication of a book about their relationship and the former president’s return to the White House for his official portrait unveiling. So little of this should be a closely guarded secret.
But it is worth repeating now for three reasons, in addition to getting a more accurate portrayal of the president’s record than the one being presented by the White House.
First, as is the case with so many issues, Biden was a follower of public (and donor) opinion inside the Democratic Party on marriage rather than a leader.
The continuity between Biden’s position from 1996 to 2012 and over the last 10 years is that wherever he has ended up has always been electorally advantageous.
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And while millions of people have changed their minds about same-sex marriage over the last quarter-century, Biden is one who is saying people who held views he advocated until he was almost 70 years old are an “ultra-MAGA” threat to democracy.
Biden supports the Respect for Marriage Act. His respect for your intelligence isn’t so well supported.