I was not the only one thrown into confusing fits over the whole Cheney-marriage statement.
Anderson Cooper asked Andrew Sullivan if former Vice President Dick Cheney was “more progressive on gay marriage than” President Barack Obama.
Sullivan:
I probably wouldn’t go that far.
Except when, hours earlier, he did:
Note that this makes him more supportive of full marriage equality than Barack Obama.
So, which is it?
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Chris Geidner is the award-winning senior political editor at D.C.'s Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, The American Prospect, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. In 2011, he received the Excellence in News Writing Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his coverage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found here, and you can follow him on Twitter.
Unless Sullivan is grading the president on a tougher curve because Obama’s a Democrat (as you have done, but would be weird for a self-proclaimed conservative like Sullivan), I still don’t see how Cheney can be seen as “more supportive of full marriage equality than Barack Obama.”
Actually, even under your analysis from earlier, if one is only judging the men’s support for “full marriage equality,” that is the one way in which I think a person could, fairly, judge Cheney to be more supportive.
If the question is who’s better on protecting LGBT families, or even more broadly, LGBT equality, then I think you’d be very hard pressed to make the case for Cheney. But if the question is simply judging on support for “full marriage equality” and nothing less, then I think there’s an argument to be made that Cheney, right now, wins the day.
I don’t agree with the idea that Obama’s personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman is more detrimental to the cause of gaining state recognition for SSM than Cheney’s support for “whatever decision [Bush] makes” regarding the Federal Marriage Amendment. I accept people’s personal discomfort with same-sex marriage just as I accept their personal discomfort with the right to obtain an abortion. It would be nice if they could be actually supportive, but the most one can really expect of other citizens is their respect for one’s rights.
Maybe, although I still think making a statement specifically opposing Prop. 8 counts for more than just being ambiguously open-minded to having states make whatever decision they want on same-sex marriage. IOW, as it often the case, Weigel gets it.
And I’d say that he states the distinction in the men’s positions and then ignores it: “1) [Obama] believed that marriage was between a man and a woman.”
Cheney has never made such a statement. That is a distinction.
Now, Sam Stein goes too far toward saying that Cheney affirmatively has lent his support to marriage equality. But, Weigel goes too far in the opposite direction, ignoring facts that even he states in order to reach the pre-determined conclusion that there is no difference.