In January of 1996 he filled out the IMPACT questionnaire, and it appears to be in his own writing, and uses the first-person “I” throughout. While the IMPACT questions were a bit more complicated, Obama did say he would oppose any attempts to outlaw same-gender marriage, by supporting a resolution stating “the state should not interfere with same-gender couples who chose [sic] to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities and commitment of civil marriage.”

This morning at Netroots Nation, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer was pressed repeatedly by dogged moderator Khali Joy Gray about his boss’s “evolution” on same-sex marriage, at one point asking if Obama was ever going to evolve back to his previous position, expressed on a 1996 candidate survey, that he supported same-sex marriage.

It’s very easy for the Third Way to congratulate itself that it got a bunch of people “from Middle America” to complain that gay men and women deprived of civil rights “don’t get it,” it’s a fundamentally dishonest project. But the people who “don’t get it” are those who pretend they can separate the institution of marriage from society’s full recognition of that institution, legally, through the rights it conveys.

In our civil society, if something is legal for one, it just has to be legal for all. The bottom line is, everyone is equal under the law.

At least that’s how I see it.

Not so, it seems, for Lanae Erickson and Jon Cowan, two Third Way muckety-mucks who recently penned a piece for the Baltimore Sun in which they argued that if LGBT Americans want to see marriage equality become a reality, they need to make it less about equality and more about embracing what the authors see as traditional values.

We should have paid closer attention to Tracey Baim, I suppose: she nicknames Barack Obama “The Great Equivocator,” having covered him since the beginning of his career. She was the managing editor of Outlines (the Chicago publication that since merged with Windy City Times) in 1996 when reporter Trudy Ring correctly reported on then-State Senate Candidate Barack Obama’s response to their candidate survey:

A fictional gay rights speech I’d like to see the President give.

The fight for marriage for gays and lesbians is gaining support in every state and even among prominent Republicans, and the National Organization for Marrriage rallies this summer have galvanized marriage equality advocates.

Today’s book salon with Lee Badgett discussing her book, ‘When Gay People Get Married’, is incredibly timely. On the heels of Judge Walker’s order finding Prop 8 unconstitutional, America has begun anew a conversation about whether same sex couples ought to be afforded the same right to marry as opposite sex couples.

Few people are as studied and knowledgeable as Lee Badgett on this subject. Aside from her professional roles as an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amerherst and as Research Director for UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, she and her wife are married under Massachusetts soon after it became the first state in the U.S. to afford marriage rights to same sex couples.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony, the soon-to-be-retired Archbishop of Los Angeles, is of the opinion that Judge Vaughn Walker was wrong in his ruling on Prop 8, because he failed to make his decision based upon religious beliefs that bless only male-female relationships.

Mahony ends up proving Walker’s point, that the only basis for the kind of discrimination that Prop 8 sought to enshrine in law grows out of certain religious and moral positions.

Cardinal, you may be free to discriminate against gays and lesbians within the Catholic church as a matter of faith, but the state of California is not free to do the same as a matter of law.

Aside from watching my children open presents on Christmas morning, nothing on this Earth fills my heart with greater, more unbridled joy than seeing a bunch of wingnuts cry.