Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Obama: I didn’t lie about supporting gay ‘marriage,’ you just didn’t understand
LifeSiteNews ^ | 2/11/15 | Ben Johnson

Posted on 02/12/2015 5:12:44 AM PST by wagglebee

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – President Barack Obama is denying an account by a close adviser that he lied about his views on gay “marriage” to get elected president in 2008. In an interview yesterday, Obama said he didn't lie; it's just that he was misunderstood.

However, Obama admitted he supported government-enforced recognition of homosexuality, and “it was frustrating to me” that he had to “square that with what were a whole bunch of religious sensitivities out there.”

Obama's close campaign operative and senior adviser David Axelrod wrote that Obama always favored redefining marriage but lied about it in order not to alienate black pastors and voters in North Carolina.

Obama strongly supported same-sex “marriage” in his 1996 run for Illinois state Senate, responding to a questionnaire by saying, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

But he changed his stance, because “oposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church,” Axelrod wrote in his new memoir, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.

By 2004, when he ran for U.S. Senate against Alan Keyes, Obama said, “I’m a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”

He maintained his public opposition to gay “marriage” – and backing of civil unions – through the 2008 campaign. But Axelrod wrote that he did so because his campaign manager, Jim Messina, warned that swing state North Carolina would not elect a candidate who favored redefining marriage.

Axelrod wrote that he had “no doubt” that Obama had stated his “heartfelt belief” in the 1996 campaign, and that Obama's noises, beginning in late 2010, that his attitudes might "evolve” on gay “marriage” was a purely calculated political stance.

“If Obama’s views were 'evolving' publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors,” Axelrod wrote. “The president was champing at the bit to announce his support for the right of gay and lesbian couples to wed.”

In an interview yesterday, Obama said that Axelrod got it all wrong. He never lied.

“I think David is mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue,” he told Ben Smith of BuzzFeed. “I think the notion that somehow I was always in favor of marriage per se isn’t quite accurate.”

“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,” he said.

He said that he felt civil unions his way of “squaring the circle.”

While his campaign previously claimed that someone else wrote the 1996 statement on behalf of redefining marriage, Obama apparently did not make that claim in the interview. Instead, he told Smith that “the old questionnaire…is an example of struggling with what was a real issue at the time, which is, how do you make sure that people’s rights are enjoyed and these religious sensitivities were taken into account?”

Obama's revolving rhetorical reality has alarmed many. The Huffington Post counted 16 separate times that Obama or his administration lied to the American people about his position on same-sex “marriage” – often claiming his opposition was built upon his strong Christian faith.

That point bolsters critics, who say Obama's references to religion are a political ploy. Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson of The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny (BOND), a strong voice for traditional values in the black community, told LifeSiteNews.com, “A lot of Christians wouldn’t vote for him if they didn’t think he was a Christian.”

But if Obama's views have changed, has his faith changed, too? Columnist David Harsanyi wondered why no one in the media asked about this apparent contradiction in 2010. “Why doesn’t someone ask Obama what’s changed about his Christianity that brought about this evolution?” he asked. “What’s clear is that Obama isn’t shy about pulling in religion when it suits his political needs. Christianity is a means of bolstering progressive ideals.”

Writer Dan Calabrese blamed mainstream media bias, especially on social issues. “Why won't the media ask him about it? Two reasons.”

“1. They already know the answer. He lied to fool people like black pastors into getting out the vote for him,” he wrote. “2. They don't see anything wrong with it. They think it's the job of black pastors to support Democrats and not to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, so if they stubbornly insist on doing the latter at the expense of the former, then they deserve to be lied to.” (Emphasis in original.)


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: baitandswitch; blackvote; caughtontape; culturewar; dnctalkingpoints; gaypresident; godgap; gruberment; homosexualagenda; jivetalkin; jiveturkey; lyingliar; moralabsolutes; nuancememe; obama; obamalied; obamalies; obamaquotes; phonychristian; religiousleft; revisionisthistory; rvisionisthistory; samesexmarriage; shuckandjive
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-34 last
To: exit82

“This may be the year Obama comes out as being gay.”

He will be hailed by the media for his bravery.


21 posted on 02/12/2015 6:26:48 AM PST by mothball
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: xzins
it is entirely rational for citizens to reject such a change in their culture

Yet judges have ruled that citizens cannot reject two groom figurines on a wedding cake.

The people have spoken, the judges have spoken, the people pipe down.

We have seen a state governor defer to a petty judge and let an innocent invalid be put to death, so nothing else a judge can do should surprise anyone.

22 posted on 02/12/2015 6:35:45 AM PST by Buttons12
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: mothball
He will be hailed by the media for his bravery.

And Dan Rather will say "Courage.". /puke

23 posted on 02/12/2015 6:37:08 AM PST by exit82 ("The Taliban is on the inside of the building" E. Nordstrom 10-10-12)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]

To: j. earl carter

Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives
Frontpagemag.com ^ | 9-2-2014 | Mallory Millett
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3200158/posts

“When women go wrong men go right after them.” – Mae West

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.

During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”

What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.

Sometime later, I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me. Katie said, “Come to New York. We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”

I hadn’t seen her for years. Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage. I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.

And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women. It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution. Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

To me, this sounded silly. I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses. I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been. I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know? Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit. I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing? Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity? And why?

I dismissed it as academic-lounge air-castle-building. I continued with my new life in New York while my sister became famous publishing her books, featured on the cover of “Time Magazine.” “Time” called her “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement.” This was because her book laid out a course in Marxism 101 for women. Her thesis: The family is a den of slavery with the man as the Bourgeoisie and the woman and children as the Proletariat. The only hope for women’s “liberation” (communism’s favorite word for leading minions into inextricable slavery; “liberation,” and much like “collective” – please run from it, run for your life) was this new “Women’s Movement.” Her books captivated the academic classes and soon “Women’s Studies” courses were installed in colleges in a steady wave across the nation with Kate Millett books as required reading...


24 posted on 02/12/2015 6:51:12 AM PST by a fool in paradise (Shickl-Gruber's Big Lie gave us Hussein's Un-Affordable Care act (HUAC).)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: Ransomed

But you recall Roberts’ basis for calling the mandate a tax? He said the wanted to defer to Congress.

The people spoke. They voted. Let it be overturned by a different vote. DEFER to the voters.

Besides, I see the natural marriage group finally getting their act together. They know now why they don’t want this change. They realize now it will dramatically change the culture. It will make it more dangerous.
They know that natural marriage is better for children.
They know that natural marriage is the only arrangement that is potentially procreative.
They know that same sex marriage is debilitating to the sexual participants.
They know that the culture forbids all kinds of other arrangements that could be called ‘pursuit of happiness’, when they, too, simply endanger a healthy culture.

An argument for ANY behavior being a person’s personal quest for happiness will be strengthened by the court forcing same sex marriage down the culture’s throat.


25 posted on 02/12/2015 7:01:19 AM PST by xzins ( Retired Army Chaplain and Proud of It! Those who truly support our troops pray for victory!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: Buttons12

Jeb backed down when he should have created a crisis. I’m certain that I would have created that crisis.

The judiciary was not intended to be legislators and executive decision makers. They were intended to be referees.


26 posted on 02/12/2015 7:03:56 AM PST by xzins ( Retired Army Chaplain and Proud of It! Those who truly support our troops pray for victory!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: subterfuge

...And an enemy islamist to boot.

And I mean “to boot!”


27 posted on 02/12/2015 7:16:21 AM PST by onedoug
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: xzins

“The people spoke. They voted. Let it be overturned by a different vote. DEFER to the voters.”

I’m with you. But if things go as I think they seem to be, that would only be a delay. I think it is short sighted to ignore what the trends of the actual popular votes seem to be pointing to. And that is ‘gay marriage’ recognized in every state in the union in 20 years even if it is ideally left up to the voters and legislatures of the states. There are states who only passed their amendments in the 50-60% ranges in the middle of the last decade that probably couldn’t pass them again right now. The ones that only passed them in the low 50% ranges would definitely not be able to do so.

“Besides, I see the natural marriage group finally getting their act together.”

I don’t see any of those arguments changing whatever judges, pols, or the voting majority think about when they decide to define the state’s version of marriage. You would think no-fault divorce would have been reversed by now if those type of arguments were persuasive to those who decide the state’s definition of marriage. But I hope you are right and I am wrong.

Freegards


28 posted on 02/12/2015 7:36:05 AM PST by Ransomed
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 25 | View Replies]

To: wagglebee

You know how to tell if 0bozi is lying? You know he is lying if he is awake.


29 posted on 02/12/2015 7:52:36 AM PST by ColdOne (I miss my poochie... Tasha 2000~3/14/11)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: a fool in paradise
Right you are: Revolution is the ultimate goal and I stand corrected.

But, I was trying to make a real point:

The left drones on about "marriage equality" when we already have that. I can't marry a man just like a homosexual male can't marry a man. The law treats us equally.

The only way to argue that the law doesn't treat us equally is to say:

Susan Smith can marry a man, but Joe Jones can not.

Logically, arguing in favor of homosexual marriage on the basis of "marriage inequality" is to argue against the legal recognition of the male and female sexes.(Leftists are capable of using logic when it advances their agenda)

I keep hearing the term "marriage inequality" so often, that I don't think my suspicions are crazy.

30 posted on 02/12/2015 8:18:38 AM PST by j. earl carter
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies]

To: rockrr

He’s a liar


31 posted on 02/12/2015 9:03:23 AM PST by mowowie (`)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies]

To: wagglebee

Obama lied? Why, I just can’t believe this. I’m going to need to sit down.

Give me a minute.

I’m going to need a glass of water.

The shock will be tough to get over.


32 posted on 02/12/2015 9:50:39 AM PST by Pinkbell (Liberal tolerance only extends to people they agree with.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: wagglebee
Liberals want us to believe that if anyone lies (ever) then all liars are excused. "See Mommy, he did it too"...

Most of us are out of 5th grade. We tried the ‘everyone does it’ excuse on our Dad's in elementary school... it's didn't work then - it's not working now.

Interesting the press is so corrupt they keep pushing comparisons...

33 posted on 02/12/2015 11:22:15 AM PST by GOPJ (If you can't get on the high horse for men burned alive and children raped, what's the horse for?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: wagglebee
OBAMA is the LIE that SPAWNS ALL LIES for America.
34 posted on 02/12/2015 11:35:49 AM PST by VideoDoctor
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-34 last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson