Whether Joe Biden was your first choice for the Democratic nomination or your last choice (or somewhere in between) there are many, many reasons to be excited about a Biden presidency.
In this series, I will list 100 reasons, 1 by 1, to be excited about a Joe Biden presidency.
Maybe you would like to be more excited about Joe. Maybe you want to learn more. Maybe you already love Joe (like me) and want to have facts to share with your friends about him. Whatever the reason, this series is designed to share information and excitement about our future president.
Reason #2 to be excited about Joe Biden: Biden was an early supporter of gay marriage.
I am old enough to remember how upset many people were in 2012 when Biden came out in favor of Gay marriage before Obama did.
During an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, as host David Gregory quizzed Biden on the subject, the Vice President made some news:
Gregory: You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?
Biden: Look, I am Vice President of the United States of America. The President sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.
This may not seem like a big deal from a 2020 lens, but in 2012 it was huge and he was ahead of Obama on this.
Mr. Biden’s unexpectedly expansive remarks made him by far the highest-ranking White House official to move closer to a formal embrace of same-sex marriage, which is now legal in six states and the District of Columbia but is unrecognized by the federal government. The Obama administration has endorsed civil unions but not marriage for gay couples.
gay rights advocates, who spent Sunday morning parsing Mr. Biden’s words, said the president’s running mate had, in their analysis, conveyed new and unmistakable support for their biggest cause.
"Other leaders might come to mind earlier,” Pete Buttigieg said of Biden. “But there’s a reason to think that the clock moved more quickly on marriage in the White House because of him."
Biden allies believe his heart has always been in the right place, even if it took his moderate politics and Catholic faith time to catch up
“We should be looking at evolution as a good thing and not something you should have to go back and reprove yourself on,” Zeke Stokes, the chief programs officer for GLAAD, an LGBTQ rights group that cosponsored the Cedar Rapids forum, told BuzzFeed News. “I think it’s widely perceived that [Biden] very much jumped out in front of the Obama administration at a time when this was critical and moved the ball forward inside the administration and in the culture. His leadership on that was really critical and has continued to be critical.”
and again, what he said in 2012 made a difference:
Marriage equality eventually became a reelection rallying cause for Obama and Biden in 2012. And many credit Biden’s endorsement for moving public opinion in favor of marriage rights. Voters that fall in Maine and Maryland backed ballot measures legalizing same-sex marriage.
“People didn’t think we were going to win,” Emily Hecht-McGowan — a Marylander who led LGBTQ equality programs for the Biden Foundation, the nonprofit Biden and his wife established after he left office.... “I personally believe that the turning point in 2012, at least in Maryland, was the vice president coming out on Meet the Press and talking about how he was in favor of marriage equality.”
“We are in a period of time right now where it seems to feel as though we are moving backwards, and in some cases we are moving backwards, given where this current administration is,” Hecht-McGowan said. “But I don’t think you can dilute or erase the impact that Vice President Biden has had on this issue — on marriage, in particular, but also on the quest, so to speak, for LGBTQ equality for the community. He is an unwavering champion.”
Not only did he his endorsement “normalize” the opinion and make it more likely to states to vote it in, but it pushed Obama to do the right thing. From 2015:
Biden’s True Legacy: He Was Obama’s Conscience on LGBTQ Rights
It’s easy to forget now, but for most of his first term, Obama was fairly lukewarm on marriage equality—the LGBTQ issue of the day. After co-orchestrating the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in late 2010, Obama backed away from gay rights, declining to commit to full equality, even after the 2011 New York marriage battle. Throughout the early months of 2012, gay Americans waited anxiously for Obama to “evolve” on marriage, but the president remained silent. As the 2012 election approached, it appeared alarmingly likely that Obama would once again campaign on a non-equality platform.
Biden parroted Obama’s line on marriage equality until April of 2012, when he attended an event hosted by a gay couple with two children.
Young people, Biden explained, couldn’t understand why gay people were still excluded from marriage. “And my job—our job,” he concluded, “is to keep this momentum rolling to the inevitable.”
Two weeks later, Biden declared his support for marriage equality on national television. Three days later, Obama did the same. Never before had a sitting president endorsed the right of same-sex couples to wed.
Would Obama have eventually championed marriage equality without Biden’s push? Of course. We now know that Obama lied about his opposition all along, hiding his actual views for fear of political blowback. The truth was bound to come out eventually—but Biden expedited the process at a key moment, turning the 2012 election into a referendum on marriage equality (at least in part) and thus making Obama’s victory all the sweeter. Obama wanted to play along with the fiction of his “evolution” for a while longer. Biden saw the stakes—saw the real families whom the law considered unequal—and forced the president’s hand. By refusing to lie, Biden made his president and his party more honest.
Even today, Biden remains at the forefront of the LGBTQ movement: Recently, he has begun calling trans discrimination “the civil rights issue of our time,” and he railed against intolerance in stark, moving terms in his October 2015 HRC keynote. But Biden’s legacy as the LGBTQ community’s first absolute ally in the upper echelon of government is already secure.
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did you miss the first day of our 100 days? Here it is:
Day 1: Biden’s Tax Plan
