Jacob Sullum on Obama's Gay Marriage Equivocation

"I favor legalizing same-sex marriages," Barack Obama told a gay newspaper while seeking his first term as an Illinois state senator in 1996, "and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." When Obama ran for re-election in 1998, he took the National Political Awareness Test, which among other things asked, "Do you believe that the Illinois government should recognize same-sex marriages?" His response: "Undecided." Senior Editor Jacob Sullum says it took Obama only two years to learn the political value of reticence regarding touchy social issues—a concept that evidently still eludes Vice President Joe Biden, whose unguarded comments about gay marriage on Sunday called unwelcome attention to his boss's studied ambiguity on the subject.