After showing a clip of President Obama’s statement today that he now favors equal marriage rights, Fox News anchor Shep Smith described the President as “now in the 21st century.” Smith then asked reporter Ed Henry, “What I’m most curious about is whether it’s your belief that in this time of rising debt and medical issues and all the rest, if Republicans would go out on a limb and try to make this a campaign issue while sitting very firmly without much question on the wrong side of history.”
Smith’s view that Republicans are on the wrong side of history on this subject is shared by other Republicans. Even North Carolina’s speaker of the state house of representives, Thom Tillis (R-Charlotte), who supported the state’s constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage and predicted it would pass (as indeed it did yesterday), also told students at North Carolina State University back on March 26 that the amendment would be repealed within 20 years.
Mitt Romney is on record opposing both civil unions and full marriage equality, though he has (typically) equivocated on giving some unspecified rights in some unspecified form to same-sex couples. In contrast, in 2004 George W Bush supported civil unions for same-sex couples, and his vice president, Dick Cheney, has for years supported marriage equality.
(Incidentally, Shep Smith’s blunt comments, such as his take on Gingrich’s withdrawal speech, have made him one of the more interesting voices on Fox News.)
(Reposted to correct a major problem in HTML code supplied by TPM that I should have caught sooner.)
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