President Barack Obama and the
Democratic Party are not ready to fully endorse gay marriage, an
Huffington Post article concluded.
The story, written by Amanda Terkel and
Sam Stein, looks at the campaign launched last month calling on the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) to include gay marriage in its
official platform.
Freedom to Marry's Democrats: Say I
Do campaign has received strong endorsements from individual
Democrats – including nearly half of all U.S.
Democratic senators, Los Angeles Mayor and Democratic Nation
Convention Chairman Antonio
Villaraigosa, and House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi – but DNC officials remain uncommitted.
“Interviews with more than a dozen
party officials and activists reveal that despite widespread and
growing support for marriage equality among Americans, the issue is
still viewed as politically sensitive in the top ranks of the
Democratic Party,” the Huffington
Post wrote.
Paul Yandura of the firm Scott+Yandura
suggested the move could put Obama, who supports civil unions for gay
couples and has said he's “evolving” on marriage, in an awkward
bind.
“Look, I'm not going to claim that
they're [the DNC] pressuring them [Democrats] not to be for it, but
this 'let's wait' thing is always what happens in politics – let's
wait so they can find a way to slow this down and maybe get a good
reason not to do it,” Yandura said.
The Young Turks host and MSBNC
contributor Cenk Uygur, however, stood by Obama, saying the president
wasn't likely to endorse gay nuptials until a solid majority of
Americans supported such unions.
“Of course, of course they are”
going to be slow in adopting gay marriage, Uygur said on his Thursday
program. “Until you got at least two-thirds of the American
population behind a certain issue, the Democrats would have nowhere
near the courage required to actually go tackle that issue. And that
goes double for President Obama.”
Uygur added that by comparison Obama
“has done reasonably well on this issue.” (The video is embedded
in the right panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)