Barack Obama Quotes
I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them.
Obama, Barack. Illinois U.S. Senate Debate against Alan Keyes. WLS-TV, Chicago, IL, 21 Oct. 2004.
What made this quotation very dramatic was that the state of Virginia, under the previous administration dominated by religious fundamentalists had passed a law banning same sex marriage. Several private Virginia citizens had sued the State in Federal Court, asserting that their Constitutional rights were violated by the ban. The Attorney general normally defends the state in any court proceeding. However, Herring agreed with the plaintiffs on the case, that the Virginia law was unconstitutional, so he and the State entered the case on the side of the plaintiffs and against the state law. His reference to the right side of history was related to the fact that as late as 1964 Virginia had a law prohibiting interracial marriage which they enforced and the Supreme Court invalidated. Thus, on marriage, Virginia had a track record of being on the wrong side of history and the law.
Earlier, he had opposed same sex marriage, but as the population as a whole had a change of mind on this issue, so did he. By 2013, 16 States had modified their laws to allow gay marriage.
This quotation illustrates the brilliance of Scalia. He was in the minority of the Justices when he opposed gay marriage. However, instead of just writing a caustic dissent—which he did—he posed this question to one of the most brilliant attorneys in the country who was arguing the case for gay marriage. Clearly, gay marriage was not considered unconstitutional when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. It is almost certain that no one in those times even considered such a prospect. However, by 2013 a number of states had allowed gay marriage, and the majority of Americans favored it. The best Olsen could answer was “There us no specific data in time. This is an evolutionary cycle”. Despite his oratory tour de force, Scalia was again in the minority and his view did not prevail. Public opinion had clearly changed, and most judges believed that the interpretation of the Constitution most also change and there is no more a specific time to say exactly when that change took place than there is to say exactly when America concluded that the nation should have Prohibition or any other social norm.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
