Even as White House aides responded to the historic ruling overturning Prop. 8, they were at pains to communicate that Obama's position on the issue was simply business as usual.
The White House was desperate not to make news this week about the president’s position on same-sex relationship recognition.
“The president does oppose same-sex marriage but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples in benefits and other issues,” David Axelrod assured Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd on MSNBC the morning after Proposition 8 was overturned. “He supports civil unions and that's been his position throughout, so nothing has changed.”
Nothing has changed… or so Axelrod hopes.
But the 138-page decision from judge Vaughn Walker was the third ruling this summer from a federal district court to find that arguments against equal rights for same-sex couples didn’t even pass the rational basis test – in other words, the judges could find no conceivable legitimate reason for the government to deprive LGBT couples of access to marriage and/or the rights associated with it.
Walker’s decision flat out declaring the Proposition 8 ballot measure unconstitutional was far more sweeping than judge Joseph Tauro’s finding that the 3rd section of DOMA violated the U.S. Constitution – that’s the section that prohibits the federal government from recognizing state sanctioned same-sex marriages.
Walker made 80 findings of fact that swept away every last vestige of unfounded homophobic rationale for circumscribing marital rights to heterosexual couples: that same-sex relationships are fundamentally inferior, that gays and lesbians are perverted, that marriage must institutionally support procreation, that LGBT parents are unfit, that affording marriage equality will harm heterosexual couples.
Every legal scholar I spoke to said that the intensely thorough nature of the analysis and conclusions drawn have provided a body of evidence that will be profoundly difficult for future judges to ignore.
Tobias B. Wolff, a constitutional law professor and former LGBT adviser to the Obama ’08 campaign, called the findings “breathtaking.” Jenny Pizer, Marriage Project director of Lambda Legal, said it was “deeply satisfying” to have a federal judge pick apart the entire basis of the antigay movement.
Naturally, as cautious lawyers go, neither of them considers anything inevitable nor did they express confidence that the worm had turned for good, so to speak.
“We do tend to have these cycles – it’s not a single vector in one direction,” Pizer said.
Indeed, Wolff noted that these cases are only reaching the federal courts now because civil rights lawyers had intentionally been bringing them at the state level heretofore.
“They were justifiably concerned about what the Supreme Court would do if they got their hands on one of these marriage cases,” he explained. “Even with Elena Kagan confirmed this will still be the most conservative Supreme Court in the last 50 years.”
Nonetheless, the fact that federal districts courts are now addressing marital rights and have begun to build a body of findings that deems antigay arguments baseless puts this issue on the national map in a new way. Or as Pizer put it, “It is quite strikingly a new chapter in the work of trying to protect same-sex couples.”
The notion that the White House even commented on the ruling was a sign the administration understood that new and important ground was being broken. But the president is entering a new political vortex now on same-sex marriage that he and his cohort seem, perhaps predictably, impervious to.
Follow us on Twitter. 
Follow us on Facebook.
Page 1 of 3