President Obama lied when he expressed his opposition to gay marriage as a 2008 presidential candidate, according to a new book by a former senior adviser.
“I’m just not very good at bulls—ting,” Obama told former senior aide David Axelrod, the political strategist wrote in his book released Tuesday, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.
“I just don’t feel my marriage is somehow threatened by the gay couple next door,” Obama said, according to Axelrod’s book.
Obama eventually came out in support of gay marriage ahead of the 2012 election, only after Vice President Joe Biden first signaled his support for same-sex matrimony.
However, it has long been rumored that Obama supported gay marriage well before making his position public.
“Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage,” Axelrod wrote. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.’ ”
In recent years, Obama has shown little hesitation to express his true views, especially as a growing number of states recognize gay marriage.
Time Magazine first reported on the book excerpts.
