The Perilous Politics Of Same-Sex Marriage — Why The President Is Still ‘Evolving’ [View all]

[kentuck]

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/gay-marriage-obama-endorse-poll.php?ref=fpb

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For those who wonder why President Obama won’t fully embrace same-sex marriage, despite relentless pressure from within his own party to do so, Tuesday night’s landslide passage of a same-sex marriage ban in North Carolina offered a reminder.

TPM has reported that the President’s current positioning is a challenge for his campaign on the messaging front. On the one hand, the President and his team have to maintain the strong support of the LGBT community, a crucial voting bloc for Democrats. But on the other, gay marriage is simply not a political winner electorally, and especially not in the swing states needed to win a second term.

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Referendum votes to affirmatively legalize gay marriage have uniformly failed over the last decade, North Carolina only being the latest example. Before that it was Maine, where the legislature passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage which was signed by then Gov. John Baldacci (D-ME), then challenged through the Citizen’s Veto process, in which opponents gathered enough signatures to put it to a statewide vote. Polls showed the measure in a dead heat a few weeks before the vote, until the opponents of same sex marriage seemed to break through at the end, as the new law when down 53 percent to 47 percent.

In now 32 cases, states have voted to amend their constitutions banning same sex marriage. The biggest battle in recent memory was the bruising battle over Proposition 8 in California, which passed 52 percent to 48 percent, and has since been struck down by the courts and is making its way through the appeals process. The one outlier is the 2006 vote in Arizona, when a narrow 51 percent 48 percent majority struck down a ban on gay marriage. Only two years later, the state voted to instate the ban.

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