I understand he explicitly supports civil unions but not gay marriage.
Barack Obama and Gay Marriage/ Civil Unions: Although Barack Obama has said that he supports civil unions, he is against gay marriage. In an interview with the Chicago Daily Tribune, Obama said, "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."
http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/lesbianactivism/p/BarackObama.htm
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Wed, 11/12/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Judith Butler on Obama
> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 3:21 PM
> [Thanks to Lou Proyect for pointing this out.]
>
> <http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/05/18549195.php>
>
> Uncritical Exuberance?
> by Judith Butler
> Wednesday Nov 5th, 2008 7:19 PM
>
> This became most salient in the emergence of the counter
> Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up
> to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama
> anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the
> following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a
> Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably
> better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their
> racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs
> without having to resolve them.
> Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time.
> My friends on the left write to me that they feel something
> akin to "redemption" or that "the country has
> been returned to us" or that "we finally have one
> of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I
> discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and
> excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having
> the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous
> relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and
> progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground,
> and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But
> let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain,
> although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The
> election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways
> that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a
> redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of
> identification that he proposes ("we are all
> united") or that we propose ("he is one of
> us"), we risk believing that this political moment can
> overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political
> life, especially political life in these times. There have
> always been good reasons not to embrace "national
> unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward
> absolute and seamless identification with any political
> leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless
> identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this
> same effort to organize political affect when, for instance,
> Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I
> love each and every one of you."
>
> It becomes all the more important to think about the
> politics of exuberant identification with the election of
> Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided
> with support for conservative causes. In a way, this
> accounts for his "cross-over" success. In
> California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some
> significant portion of those who voted for him also voted
> against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we
> understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember
> that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights.
> Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have
> found that the electorate is not as galvanized by
> "moral" issues as they were in recent elections;
> the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be
> predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully
> structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious
> concerns. This is clearly one reason why Palin's
> assigned public function to galvanize the majority of the
> electorate on moral issues finally failed. But if
> "moral" issues such as gun control, abortion
> rights and gay rights were not as determinative as they once
> were, perhaps that is because they are thriving in a
> separate compartment of the political mind. In other words,
> we are faced with new configurations of political belief
> that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at
> the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with
> Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him. This
> became most salient in the emergence of the counter
> Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up
> to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama
> anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the
> following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a
> Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably
> better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their
> racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs
> without having to resolve them.
>
> Along with strong economic motivations, less empirically
> discernible factors have come into play in these election
> results. We cannot underestimate the force of
> dis-identification in this election, a sense of revulsion
> that George W. has "represented" the United States
> to the rest of the world, a sense of shame about our
> practices of torture and illegal detention, a sense of
> disgust that we have waged war on false grounds and
> propagated racist views of Islam, a sense of alarm and
> horror that the extremes of economic deregulation have led
> to a global economic crisis. Is it despite his race, or
>