President Obama announced Wednesday that he now supports same sex couples’ right to get married. The president, who had been against gay marriage in 2008 but later said his views were “evolving,” explained that he had decided to support gay marriage some time ago, but had been deciding the most appropriate time to publicly announce it. However, Vice President Joe Biden’s comments earlier last weekend that he was “comfortable” with gay marriage put pressure on Obama to clarify his own stance...
Obama’s announcement came the day after North Carolina voters passed an amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman...
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/will-obamas-support-of-gay-marriage-help-him-politically
Running for the Illinois state senate in 1998, Barack Obama said he was "undecided" on whether to legalize same-sex marriage. Fast forward six years.
"What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman." That was U.S. Senate candidate Obama in 2004. "What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing something before God, and it's not simply the two persons who are meeting."
"My feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this," he said in 2010, two years into his presidency. He told Jake Tapper, now anchor of CNN's "The Lead," that "at this point, what I've said is, that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have."
Government sources told CNN that Obama made the final decision to file the Supreme Court briefs in the current cases, and the legal language to use.
This was all set in motion in the heat of the president's re-election campaign last year..
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/supreme-court-preview-obama/
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