Biden OK with equal rights for married gay couples

JULIE PACE

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden says he’s “absolutely com­fort­able” with gay cou­ples who marry get­ting the same civil rights and lib­er­ties as het­ero­sex­ual cou­ples, a stand that gay rights advo­cates inter­preted as an endorse­ment of same-sex marriage.

But the White House and Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s re-election cam­paign, eager to avoid a debate on a hot-button social issue in an elec­tion year, insisted that Biden was not break­ing ranks with Obama, who does not pub­licly sup­port gay marriage.

Biden told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that mar­riage should be about being loyal to some­one you love, whether that mar­riage is between a man and a woman, two men or two women. “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,” Biden said in the inter­view broad­cast Sunday.

Gay rights advo­cates said Biden’s com­ments sig­naled unmis­tak­able sup­port for gay mar­riage, which they said made him the highest-ranking mem­ber in the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to take that position.

“”I’m grate­ful that the vice pres­i­dent of the United States is now pub­li­cally sup­port­ing mar­riage equal­ity and I hope very soon the pres­i­dent and the rest of our lead­ers, Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats in Con­gress, will fall in line with the vice pres­i­dent,” said Chad Grif­fin, a gay rights sup­porter and a mem­ber of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee.

Joe Sol­monese, the pres­i­dent of the Human Rights Cam­paign, said his group was encour­aged by Biden’s com­ments and called on Obama to speak out for “full mar­riage equal­ity” for same-sex couples.

While Obama opposes gay mar­riage, he says his per­sonal views on the mat­ter are “evolv­ing” and has noted that polls show Amer­i­cans are increas­ingly sup­port­ing same-sex marriage.

Biden, a devout Catholic, has said pre­vi­ously that his per­sonal views, as well as the country’s, on gay mar­riage are evolving.

The vice president’s office said Sun­day after the inter­view aired that Biden’s com­ments were not an endorse­ment of gay mar­riage, but sim­ply a reaf­fir­ma­tion of his belief that same-sex cou­ples deserve the same rights and pro­tec­tions as all Americans.

David Axel­rod, a senior adviser to the Obama cam­paign, chimed in on Twit­ter, say­ing Biden and Obama share the view that all mar­ried cou­ples should have the same legal rights.

For the Obama cam­paign, gay mar­riage has become a vex­ing election-year issue.

Each time the cam­paign pro­motes the president’s exten­sive work in advanc­ing gay rights, includ­ing end­ing the military’s ban on openly gay ser­vice mem­bers, it is reminded of the one area where the pres­i­dent has fallen short in the eyes of gay rights advocates.

Sev­eral Democ­rats are push­ing for Obama to include sup­port for gay mar­riage in the party’s plat­form, which will be final­ized at the Demo­c­ra­tic con­ven­tion this summer.

Cam­paign offi­cials have played down the notion that Obama’s posi­tion on gay mar­riage will “evolve” before the Novem­ber elec­tion. They say Obama’s record in sup­port­ing other gay rights issues stands in stark con­trast to his Repub­li­can chal­lenger Mitt Rom­ney, an ardent oppo­nent of gay mar­riage and other ben­e­fits for same-sex couples.

One gay rights advo­cate said that even before the NBC inter­view, Biden had been hint­ing that his per­sonal views of gay mar­riage may have evolved more quickly than the president’s.

The advo­cate described a pri­vate meet­ing Biden had with about 30 gay and les­bian sup­port­ers in Los Ange­les ear­lier this spring. When the vice pres­i­dent was asked about his per­sonal views of gay mar­riage, the advo­cate said Biden told sup­port­ers that when his views dif­fer from the president’s, he often has to keep his opin­ions to himself.

This per­son spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity because par­tic­i­pants at the meet­ing agreed not to dis­cuss pub­licly what was said at the pri­vate gathering.

Biden did men­tion the Los Ange­les event in his inter­view Sun­day. He said that after meet­ing the chil­dren of the gay cou­ple host­ing the event, he told them he wished “every Amer­i­can could see the look of love those kids has in their eyes for you guys. And they wouldn’t have any doubt about what this is about.”

Posted by AP News on May 6 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.