Marco Rubio Makes Up His Mind on Antigay Constitutional Amendment

After sidestepping the question for months, presidential hopeful and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio appears to have made up his mind about amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

"I don't support a constitutional amendment," Rubio told reporters at the Cedar Rapids Country Club in Iowa Wednesday, according to Bloomberg. "I don't believe the federal government should be in the marriage regulation business."

Rubio stopped short of outright endorsing efforts to stop government agencies from licensing any marriages, as his rival Republican candidate Rand Paul advocated last month. Other Republican candidates, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has yet to declare his candidacy, have all backed efforts to pass some kind of antigay amendment, some as recently as last month.

"We can continue to disagree with it," Rubio said of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in favor of nationwide marriage equality. "Perhaps a future court will change that decision, in much the same way as it's changed other decisions in the past. But my opinion is unchanged, that marriage should continue to be defined as one man and one woman. The decision is what it is, and that's what we'll live under."

Rubio's current stance is a shift from his prior thoughts on amending the Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, as he told Slate in 2009 that he had "mixed feelings about that."

Just one month before the Supreme Court affirmed that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, Rubio told the Christian Broadcasting Network it was "absurd" to think such a right existed. In that same interview, he also claimed that marriage equality posed a "real and present danger" to mainstream Christianity.

But now that the Supreme Court has declared the freedom to marry to be the law of the land, the U.S. senator, who graduated cum laude with a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law, appears to have changed his tune -- or at least updated his verses.

"I disagree with the decision on constitutional grounds," Rubio said Wednesday. "Irrespective of how one may feel about the definition of marriage, we're still all Americans."

Then again, shifting stances and moral triangulation is nothing new for the Florida Republican, whose party has alternately hailed him as the "Republican Savior" and the fresh, young face of an increasingly stodgy Grand Old Party.