Cardinal Burke: Obama Policies 'Hostile Toward Christian Civilization'

source: http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/catholic-christian-cardinal-secular/2014/03/21/id/561046/

Friday, 21 Mar 2014 

By Todd Beamon

President Barack Obama's policies "have become progressively more hostile toward Christian civilization," Cardinal Raymond Burke, the Vatican's chief justice, said this week.

"He appears to be a totally secularized man who aggressively promotes anti-life and anti-family policies," Burke, president of the Apostolic Signatura, said in an interview published Thursday by LifeSiteNews.com. "Now he wants to restrict the exercise of the freedom of religion to freedom of worship.

"He holds that one is free to act according to his conscience within the confines of his place of worship but that, once the person leaves the place of worship, the government can constrain him to act against his rightly-formed conscience, even in the most serious of moral questions," Burke said.

"Such policies would have been unimaginable in the United States even 40 years ago."

Burke is the former archbishop of St. Louis. In December, Pope Francis removed the conservative cardinal from his seat on the Vatican's influential Congregation for Bishops.

The cardinal's wide-ranging interview was first published in Polish in Polonia Christiana magazine.

Burke also said that priests should deny communion to Catholic politicians who support such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage.

"In the case of a politician or other public figure who acts against the moral law in a grave matter," he said, "and yet presents himself to receive Holy Communion, the priest should admonish the person in question and then, if he or she persists in approaching to receive Holy Communion, the priest should refuse to give the Body of Christ to the person.

"The priest’s refusal to give Holy Communion is a prime act of pastoral charity, helping the person in question to avoid sacrilege and safeguarding the other faithful from scandal."

Burke, who has long contended that priests should withhold communion to Catholic politicians with such views, added that he was encouraged by the growing pro-life movement in the United States, despite the Supreme Court's 1973 decision upholding a woman's right to an abortion.

"It is true that the Supreme Court decision stands, but it is also true that the pro-life movement has grown ever stronger in the United States," he said. "More and more citizens, especially young citizens, have been awakened to the truth about the grave evil of procured abortion."

In addition, Burke said that "false" interpretations of the First Amendment that separate church and state have led the Catholic Church to become "timid regarding its solemn duty to defend the truth in the public forum.

"The non-establishment clause prohibits an established religion or religion of the state in the USA, but it does not prohibit the church from witnessing publicly to the truth."

Such interpretations, he said, have "favored the anti-life and anti-family movements in the USA."

Most Dishonest President Ever

Denise Anne Gill via Rush Limbaugh

This is so very TRUE!!!! This is an American nightmare come true!!! we have been hijacked by an emotionally disturbed wacko!

The Most Dishonest President Ever? - The Rush Limbaugh Show

www.rushlimbaugh.com

RUSH: The purpose of this press conference was for Obama to repeat two words for one hour: "ransom" and "hostage" and attach them to Republicans.

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  Holy Rosary sorry Americans this was your choice

  
  
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  Denise Anne Gill  

  Yes the people abused their freedom and voted him in. The people have been unknowingly prepared for 100 years to be so medicated by materialism and a perverted sense of fairness and a complete perversion of our great constitution that we voted for an unrecognized enemy because he promises them all an unrealistic and unrestrained gross sense of freedom that leads to death and self annihilation, replacing guilt with entitlement and God with government He goes out of his way to avoid saying we get our rights from God.All the progressives do this unless it is politically expedient at the time to get votes by the mainstream Christians.
  
  He divides and gives each group free stuff after insisting they deserve it and are entitled. This he does by taking from the wealthy whom he demonizes according to his own perverted non-Christian morals and this allows the takers feel justified. The demons are white male middle aged successful Christian family men. He is dividing people as satan does in causing disunity rather than unity. I have never heard of anything like this in the history of our great nation! We had come so far that we elected a black president who was overwhelmingly voted in the first time and he had no particular family heritage or other things normally associated with unfairness and racism. The people had high hopes, but his character was not examined because of 2 politically incorrect taboos; his race and his religion.
  
  He spent 20 years in a church with a very radical pastor who was not only his pastor for all those years, but he was his mentor, best friend, uncle-type as Obama has himself described. This is a disgrace! Absolutely his religious associations should have been examined considering his close relationship with this American-hater. This is how his morals and character were formed and where he gets his values and what he values. If I went to the same church for 20 years and closely associated with my priest who I vacationed with and considered as my uncle.You bet you ought gather information about my own mindset. But because of this and added the sensitivities of race in relation to old wounds, it was not politically correct to look into this obvious RED FLAG. People are not right in their thinking because progressivism has taken over their minds and critical thinking is all but gone away in progressive educational system that has taken over our children's minds. They are blind and see everything superficially.
  
  Obama: "My individual salvation depends on our collective salvation"
  SCARY!!! I don't want to be collectively saved!!!
  
  “I am absolutely convinced that culture Wars are just so ’90s. Their days are growing dark.”
  ~Barack Obama ,July 17, 2007/Speaking at the Planned Parenthood

  
  
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  Denise Anne Gill 2009
  President Barack Obama stated at a press conference in Turkey last week that we Americans “do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Muslim nation, but rather, a nation of citizens who are, uh, bound by a set of values.”
  
  WRONG! Mr. President, according to our founders and our "Declaration of Independence" which is the spirit of the Constitution of our nation, we most certainly are a Christian nation. And the very foundation of our laws is based on Christian values that can be applied universally, not universal values that we agree on!!
  
  HUGE DIFFERENCE!!
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  Janet Taranto Olkowski Obama's training for turning our country into a socialist nation started in his childhood, not just his Chicago "church". http://patdollard.com/.../

  

  Bombshell Obama Vetting: 1979 Newspaper Article By Valerie Jarrett Father-In-Law Reveals Start...

  patdollard.com

  Why would Muslim oil billionaires finance and develop controlling relationships with black college students? Well, like anyone else, they would do it for self-interest. And what would their self-interest be? We all know the top two answers to that question: 1. a Palestinian state and 2. the advancem...

President Obama Declares The Future Must Not Belong to Practicing Christians

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
--President Obama,
September 25th, 2012

By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | September 25th, 2012 
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly the President of the United States declared that the future does not belong to practicing Christians. Already, the media and the left are in full denial, probably based on their general lack of understanding of theology. This would have been a gaffe had Mitt Romney said it. But with Barack Obama, he’s just speaking bold truths. His bold truth declares that the future does not belong to practicing Christians.

Pay careful attention to what he says.

"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, and that is the vision we will support."

Now, that’s the full paragraph so no one can claim I took him out of context.

But consider this.

It is an orthodox Christian belief that Mohammed is not a prophet. Actual Christians, as opposed to many of the supposed Christians put up by the mainstream media, believe that Christ is the only way to salvation. Believing that [Christ is the only way to salvation] is not slandering Mohammed. That’s just a fact.  The fact is, many religions do not recognize Mohammed as a prophet. In the widest swath of Islam, that denial is, in and of itself, considered slander.

If you don’t believe me, you go into the Middle East and proclaim Christ is the way, the truth, and the life and see what happens to your life.

Then Barack Obama went on to say “Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied.” Note he says we cannot “slander the prophet of Islam” but it’s only the image of Christ in the next sentence — not actually Christ himself desecrated. If this is so, why does Barack Obama’s government continue funding the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded Christ in piss, the Virgin Mary painted in dung, etc.?

Now, in point of fact, this is a major difference between Islam and Christianity. Christ came to this world as an enemy of the world and expected to be impugned. He also tells his followers that they should expect to be impugned. There is joy in being persecuted for following the Risen Lord. In Islam, if you impugn Mohammed, you get a fatwa on your butt.

And then there is the first amendment. The President of the United States tried to have it both ways in his speech.

"I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech. Here in the United States, countless publications provoke offense. Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs. Moreover, as President of our country, and Commander-in-Chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so. Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views – even views that we disagree with."

We do so not because we support hateful speech, but because our Founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views, and practice their own faith, may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can become a tool to silence critics, or oppress minorities. We do so because given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech – the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.

"I know that not all countries in this body share this understanding of the protection of free speech. Yet in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete. The question, then, is how we respond. And on this we must agree: there is no speech that justifies mindless violence."

Just words, Mr. President? You say “there is no speech that justifies mindless violence,” but all last week you condemned a ridiculous video trailer for a movie that does not exist. Your government ran advertisements in Pakistan denouncing the video. What of free speech, Mr. President? Last week you were saying the violence was understandable given the offensive film and this week you are trying to claim it was mindless.

Oh wait, you did it again in the same speech where you said “there is no speech that justifies mindless violence”:

"At times, the conflicts arise along the fault lines of faith, race or tribe; and often they arise from the difficulties of reconciling tradition and faith with the diversity and interdependence of the modern world. In every country, there are those who find different religious beliefs threatening; in every culture, those who love freedom for themselves must ask how much they are willing to tolerate freedom for others."

That is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.

Time and again the President of the United States tries to have it both ways.

But are they just words?

The fact is, many religions do not recognize Mohammed as a prophet. In the widest swath of Islam, that denial is, in and of itself, slander. So what exactly are you saying Mr. President?

As an exit point, with all of President Obama’s statements on tolerance in his speech, we should remember that tolerance is really not a Christian virtue. As Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia noted, 

“We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty — these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it’s never an end itself.” 

The Archbishop also noted that evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant and then it seeks to silence good. That’s not a statement that the President is evil in any way, shape, or form, but we should be mindful . . . . .

 

When the secular world demands tolerance for all, tolerance for all means we cannot have standards of faith to live by, because those standards obviously require we be intolerant of sins this world has embraced.

Obama’s Blasphemy Law . . . . to Protect Islam

Posted by FactReal on September 27, 2012

SAY GOODBYE TO FREE SPEECH The Obama administration pushed for the global “Anti-Blasphemy” laws (UN Resolution 16/18) which seeks to limit free speech and to outlaw any scrutiny of Islam. The Obama administration cooperated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a confederacy of 56 Muslim states, whose real agenda is to criminalize criticisms of Islam and to impose Sharia law. “Every year since 1999 the OIC has steered through the U.N.’s human rights apparatus a resolution condemning the “defamation of religion,” which for the bloc of 56 Muslim states covered incidents ranging from satirizing Mohammed in a newspaper cartoon to criticism of shari’a and post-9/11 security check profiling,” CNSNews reported. Their ruse for now is that the resolution is against “religious intolerance,” but do you think that 56 Muslim states will work so hard to defend Jews and Christians?

At the White House, Obama and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a confederacy of 56 Muslim states, pushing for global blasphemy laws. (April 2011)

Via CNSNews: For more than a decade, the OIC has been calling for the outlawing of “religious defamation,” pushing through resolutions at the U.N. General Assembly and human rights bodies each year. Western democracies opposed the move, until last year the Obama administration and OIC co-sponsored a compromise resolution condemning stigmatization based on religion but differing from the earlier “defamation” measures by not calling for legal restrictions – except in the specific case of religion-based “incitement to imminent violence.” Via Forbes: Resolution 16/18 seeks to limit speech that is viewed as “discriminatory” or which involves the “defamation of religion” – specifically that which can be viewed as “incitement to imminent violence.” [...] What opponents (rightly) find distressing are calls to adopt “measures to criminalize incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief.” [...] …[T]he resolution does nothing to prevent the continued use of anti-Jewish materials in the schools of Saudi Arabia… or the ongoing persecution of Jews and Christians in numerous Muslim countries. [...] [B]y agreeing to curb speech that could lead to “imminent violence,” we in essence accept the blame for any terrorist acts against America (and the West). We agreed not to provoke, after all. Via Human Events: This concept of global “blasphemy laws,” to which the Obama Administration is very obviously not hostile, is a long-cherished goal of Islamic supremacists. It is also Constitutional sacrilege. The version supported by this President and his people contains a few rhetorical flourishes toward freedom of speech… But once the principle of free speech is compromised in this way, everything that follows is merely haggling over the price of liberty…and angry mobs ready to murder and pillage over perceived offenses will always be more aggressive negotiators than thin-blooded bureaucrats, whose superiors worry primarily about getting through the next news cycle with their approval ratings intact. We are watching religion being used “as an excuse to stifle freedom of expression,” with the cooperation of the Obama Administration, right before our eyes. Via Heritage Foundation: As recently as December 19, 2011, the U.S. voted for and was instrumental in passing ‘U.N. Resolution 16/18’ against ‘religious intolerance,’ ‘condemning the stereotyping, negative profiling and stigmatization of people based on their religion.’ While this may sound innocuous, it was the latest incarnation of a highly controversial ‘anti-blasphemy’ resolution that has been pushed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at the United Nations since 1999.” Via NewsBusters: Patrick Goodenough of our sister organization CNS News wrote back in December of 2011, that “the resolution, an initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), is based on one passed by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in Geneva last spring [of 2011]. The State Department last week hosted a meeting to discuss ways of ‘implementing’ it.”  After all, “U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 was negotiated between the Obama Administration and Egypt, a prominent member of the Saudi-championed Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).” Via CNSNews: Several meetings have been held since then to discuss ways to “implement” resolution 16/18…[I]n Istanbul in July last year…Secretary of State Hillary Clinton..told the gathering effective ways to counter speech that upset religious adherents would include “interfaith education, antidiscrimination laws, and the use of “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming.”

EFFECTS - Obama Administration Asks YouTube To Remove Mohammed Film - U.S. Military Chief Calls Pastor Terry Jones Asking Him To Disavow Mohammed Film - Obama Runs Apology TV Ad in Pakistan Apologizing for our Free Speech - Egypt Charges Pastor Terry Jones and 7 U.S. Coptic Christians for “Insulting” Mohammed - US Embassy in Egypt deletes tweets apologizing to Muslims - Cairo Embassy Statement in Tune with Obama U.N. Resolution - US Embassy in Pakistan Apologizes via Twitter; Islamic Mob Storms Diplomatic Enclave - Muslim Leaders Make Case for Global Blasphemy Ban at U.N. - Islamic Bloc: We Told You This Would Happen If You ‘Hurt the Religious Sentiments of Muslims’ - Man behind Mohammed video is detained by LA County Sheriff’s officers (9/15/2012) - Iranian Regime Threatens to Sue Obama Using New UN Blasphemy Law He Signed RELATED - Obama Administration Pushes UN Resolution That Bans Criticism of Islamic Radicalism - LIST: Islamic Excuses for Riots…before 9/11/2012 - LIST: Islamic Terror Attacks against USA before 9/11/2001 - MUSLIM CRUSADES Started Four Centuries Before the Western Crusades

Anthrax Vaccine - Black Babies - Obamanation

Obama 'ethics panel' gives thumbs up to testing anthrax vaccines on American babies

by Mike Adams

I feel obliged to warn you in advance that unless you're an evil demon who enjoys the suffering of others, you're going to have a VERY hard time reading this article. What you are about to confront here is extremely disturbing, racist, murderous and downright evil. Proceed at your own risk.

Here's the story: It's time to start using American babies as guinea pigs to test a bioweapons anthrax vaccine, concludes a presidential "ethics panel." (Yes, the word "ethics" is not a typo.) Presumably, these will be black babies, as the history of U.S. government medical experiments on American citizens seems to always end up targeting blacks (see below).

The purpose of these medical experiments on U.S. black babies is, of course, to get FDA approval for a "pediatric anthrax vaccine." Never mind the fact that the risk of being exposed to anthrax is practically zero. Is anybody dying from anthrax these days? Are children coming home from school after "catching anthrax" from their friends? Nope.

Anthrax is a non-issue in America. No child needs an anthrax vaccine. This is all one big push by the corrupt government working in collusion with the criminal vaccine industry to use human babies as guinea pigs so that the vaccine industry can sell tens of millions of doses of this vaccine to the government under the guise of "homeland security."

While Big Pharma's medical scientists are no doubt drooling over the prospect of getting a presidential thumbs up for using human babies as live guinea pigs, not everybody is happy about this decision. "[People] ...say the children would be guinea pigs in a study that would never help them and might harm them," reports Reuters.

Reuters goes on to report:

Vera Sharav, founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, predicted that such a study would cause "moral harm for us as a nation and suffering for the children. They should have said, 'thou shalt not.'"

In reading this, you might even wonder why they want to use human babies for these experiments instead of the usual primates (lab monkeys). There's a very disturbing answer to that question...
Amazed that folks will just dismiss this. The truth is only a few keystrokes away. Be willing to know what you support.

 

 http://www.naturalnews.com/039556_anthrax_vaccine_children_medical_experiments.html#ixzz2O5wkYZac

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/03/19/174550155/bioethics-panel-warns-against-anthrax-vaccine-testing-on-kids

http://tammybruce.com/2013/03/an-obama-ethics-panel-approves-testing-anthrax-vaccine-in-children-including-infants.html

http://www.infowars.com/govt-moves-to-give-children-deadly-vaccine/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/19/us-anthrax-vaccine-children-idUSBRE92I03220130319

http://news.yahoo.com/test-anthrax-vaccine-children-gets-tentative-ok-040141495--finance.html

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/health/130320/us-bioethics-panel-tentatively-oks-testing-anthrax-vaccine-children

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57575169/anthrax-vaccine-tests-in-children-not-expected-soon/

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2998939/posts

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/it-ethical-test-anthrax-vaccine-children

http://www.dailypaul.com/278923/disabled-veteran-warns-do-not-test-anthrax-vaccine-on-children

http://www.lifenews.com/2013/03/20/obama-bioethics-council-oks-anthrax-vaccine-testing-on-kids/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/19/anthrax-vaccine-bioethics/1997167/

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781023

And MANY more sources are out there for anyone who cares to actually look.

Bioethics Panel Warns Against Anthrax Vaccine Testing On Kids : NPR

www.npr.org

Obama Throws 'Equal Pay' Stones from Glass House

There is no greater example of how phony and disingenuous the “war on women” rhetoric President Barack Obama and Democrats are using against Republicans this election cycle than the Obama Administration’s war on its female staffers in the White House.

Today is “National Equal Pay Day,” and Obama wrote a political proclamation in which he used the oft-cited figure that women make 77 percent of what males do and African-American and Hispanic women make 64 percent and 56 percent, respectively, of what men make.

The irony is, Obama says this to turn out working class and minority women voters to secure himself four more years in the White House, wherein he can continue to deny his female staffers “equal pay for equal work.” According to a study the Washington Free Beacon did of the salaries of White House staffers, women made 18 percent less than men did in Obama’s White House.
With that in mind, all of Obama’s words today ring extremely hollow.

In his presidential proclamation, Obama cited the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which extended the time period in which women could sue their employers for wages lost due to discrimination and mentioned that he created the “National Equal Pay Task Force” to identify equal pay violations.
One can only wonder if this task force examined his White House.

“On National Equal Pay Day, let us resolve to become a Nation that values the contributions of our daughters as much as those of our sons, denies them no opportunity, and sets no limits on their dreams,” Obama wrote. “I call upon all Americans to recognize the full value of women's skills and their significant contributions to the labor force, acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination, and join efforts to achieve equal pay.”

Based on the Obama administration's unequal pay for female employees, one can wonder how much Obama values the “contributions of our daughters as much as those of our sons.”
Before he calls upon “all Americans to recognize” the “full value of women’s skills” and “acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination,” he should first call upon his administration to do so and “join efforts to achieve equal pay” that he is calling others to join.

There has been a pattern of hostility toward women in Obama’s White House.
As the Los Angeles Times wrote in a story on Ron Suskind’s book about the Obama White House, “Confidence Men,” “One of the major disclosures in [the book] was that women working in the Obama White House often felt marginalized, that a frat-boy atmosphere that prevailed in the 2008 campaign carried over into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

In Suskind’s book, Anita Dunn is quoted as saying, “looking back, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace. … Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.’’

So when Obama writes on Equal Pay Day that “his Administration is committed to securing equal pay for equal work” and “working women are at the heart of an America built to last,” one can only wonder why the mainstream media does not point to his administration as an example of “equal pay for equal work” and his White House as representative of an America “built to last.”

Obama and Democrats will continue to use Sandra Flukes and contraception non-controversies to fuel their “war on women” talking point, even as their major surrogates like Hilary Rosen denigrate stay-at-home moms, in order to distract the electorate. They rely on these distractions because they are rightfully worried that women may not support him as strongly if his administration’s hypocritical actions toward the women who work for him received more sunlight.

by Tony Lee 17 Apr 2012

SOURCE: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/17/obama-throws-equal-pay-stones-from-glass-house

Obama’s Marriage Maneuvers

May 8, 2012, 11:35 pm  SOURCE: NYTimes Opinion Page

By ROSS DOUTHAT

5:47 p.m. | Update Visit my blog for an update to this column written after President Obama’s statements about same-sex marriage today.
In the latest Gallup poll, 50 percent of Americans support redefining marriage to include same-sex couples – which is more than the percentage of Americans that supported the Affordable Care Act, think favorably of the controversial 2009 stimulus package, or approve of Barack Obama’s job performance in general. Among independent voters, meanwhile, support for same-sex marriage is up to 57 percent, meaning that more independents support same-sex marriage today than voted for Obama during his easy victory in 2008.
Given these numbers, it seems a little strange that the president is so unwilling to acknowledge what every non-delusional Washington observer believes to be the case – that like his voluble vice-president, he is part of the emerging pro-same-sex-marriage majority, rather than the opponent that he still officially pretends to be. Why does a president who declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act persist in the ridiculous pretense of an “evolving” position, one might reasonably ask (an evolution that will be complete, one assumes, the day he wins re-election), when same-sex marriage might actually be a political winner, and his wink-and-a-nod approach to the issue looks so transparently calculated?
Journalists looking for an answer to this question have largely focused on the possibility that a presidential shift on same-sex marriage might depress Democratic turnout among blacks and Hispanics, two crucial constituencies in which support for same-sex unions is lower than in the country as a whole.
But there are two deeper reasons why the president might be leery of being honest about what we can reasonably assume are his actual convictions on the issue.

Doug Mills/The New York TimesVice President Joe Biden caused a stir over his support for gay marriage.

The first reason is that while the increase in public support for same-sex marriage over the last two decades has been astonishingly swift, it has not been irreversible. Instead, sudden bursts of legal momentum – mostly driven by judicial rulings, from Massachusetts to Iowa – have often prompted temporary backlashes. In Gallup’s polling, support for same-sex marriage rose from 35 percent to 42 percent between 1999 and 2004, but then dropped back to 37 percent; it rose to 46 percent just before Obama’s 2008 victory, but then dropped back to 40 percent a year later. Today’s 50 percent support likewise represents a slight drop-off from the high of 53 percent in the survey Gallup conducted last year.
This pattern suggests that Americans grow more resistant to same-sex marriage the more they feel that it’s being imposed upon them by an unelected judicial elite, and grow more supportive the more it seems to be gaining ground organically. A president is not an unelected judge, but a public flip-flop on the issue by the nation’s chief executive might feel like yet another elite attempt to pre-empt a debate that appears to be moving toward a resolution, but hasn’t quite been settled yet.
The second reason for the White House’s caution is that opinion polling has consistently understated opposition to same-sex marriage since the issue rose to national prominence. Voters who say they support it when Gallup and other pollsters come calling can behave very differently in the privacy of the voting booth.
In a 2010 paper, for instance, the New York University political scientist Patrick J. Egan compared polling in advance of state same-sex marriage referendums to the actual results, and found that

the share of voters in pre-election surveys saying that they will vote to ban same-sex marriage is typically seven percentage points lower than the actual vote on election day.

That seven-point gap between appearances and reality may help explain why same-sex marriage supporters lost referendums they expected to win in liberal states like Maine and California. And it explains why a savvy White House might take polls suggesting that the issue is a political winner with a very large helping of salt.
But to say that the president’s approach is understandable does not mean that it’s necessarily defensible. Supporters of same-sex marriage have worked very hard to frame their issue, not as an ordinary political conflict, but as an all-or-nothing question that pits enlightenment and progress against reaction, bigotry and hate. I don’t accept that framing, but I accept that its architects genuinely believe in it, and see the conflict over same-sex unions as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, with no possibility of middle ground.
If same-sex marriage isn’t an issue where people can disagree in good faith, though, then the president’s evasions and obfuscations can’t be treated as ordinary political maneuverings, and excused as just so much politics-as-usual. If the debate is as black and white as many supporters of same-sex marriage argue, then they should be much harder on political leaders who pretend that it’s a gray area.
Indeed, if you accept the framing of the debate that many liberals (and many journalists) embrace, then you have to acknowledge that President Obama has spent the last four years lying to the American people about his convictions on one of the defining civil rights issues of our time, and giving aid and comfort to pure bigotry in the service of his other political priorities.
This is a harsh indictment, but it’s one that follows inexorably from premises that many of the president’s own supporters have wholeheartedly embraced. If they hold true to these premises — and the press holds true to its obligations — then the kind of uncomfortable questions the White House spent this week dodging will be asked again and again of the president over the course of the campaign to come.