The Obama's recent announcement that he now supports a "gay marriage" deserves a few comments.
1. Why Obama does it?
First and foremost, it is not a secret why such a sudden change of his position came now - in order to be re-elected in November Obama has to make maximum effort to distract voters from the economic issues. Recently he tried to tout his assassination of Bin Laden, but the attempt backfired - both due to the absurdity of the assumption that another president would not make a similar decision, as well as because of the strangeness of a Democratic president playing a tough guy, G.W.Bush-style.
2. How Romney should respond?
It would be really interesting to see how Romney responds to this announcement. He will lose a lot, if he picks this culture war fight. In my opinion, acknowledging publicly that the issue is important, but pointing out that the President is merely trying to distract the Americans from the economic problems would be the strongest answer.
3. Should there be "Gay marriage" or... equal rights?
"Gay marriage" is really an absurd combination of words, since it necessarily involves a collision between the civil rights and the religious idea of marriage. The right thing to do would be to separate completely the civil rights granted to long-term couples (homosexual and heterosexual alike) and the religious "marriage", as performed by a priest, rabbi or an imam. This is the way how it is done in many civilized countries. French couples, for example, are quite content saying "We are not married - we are PACSés" - meaning that they prefer not to deal with religious issues. One step further would be to simply acknowledge the rights of the de-facto long-term couples - married or not.
Obama himself is perfectly aware of this, since up till recently he supported the civil unions, but not the marriage. I dare say however, that the President is now more interested in picking a fight with conservative Christians, then he is interested in the human rights.
Update:
It is now unclear what the buzz is about, since Obama has not promised to actually do anything, but only expressed his personal views. A quick internet search will convince you that Obama
i) supported the gay marriage in 1996, when running for the Illinois senate: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."
ii) opposed it when running for the US senate in 2004: "I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman but I detest the bashing and vilifying of gays and lesbians."
iii) and again supports it now, in 2012: “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go
ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get
married.”
