When President Barack Obama announced to the nation, with theatrics reminiscent of LeBron James’s “The Decision”, that while he was now personally in favor for gay marriage, he favored a states’ rights approach to the issue, the mainstream media collectively gushed over Obama’s flip-flop. Newsweek put Obama on its cover, with a ridiculous and obnoxious rainbow halo over his head, and called him “The First Gay President.” The New Yorker’s cover had a White House with rainbow columns.
The media also went on a rampage in painting Republicans as Neanderthals who have not evolved along with Obama. They immediately implied that black voters, many of whom reject gay marriage, needed to evolve. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews took it a step further and told a black pastor who was against gay marriage, “I hope you evolve.” And media also put the heat on socially conservative, Catholic Hispanic voters who may not have evolved along with the nation’s “first gay president.”
Yet, as a post by Carol Felsenthal at The Hill observes, the media did not put any heat on Democrats who were still “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, the most prominent of whom is none other than Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State and a darling of the mainstream media and liberal activists.
As Felsenthal notes, two of Obama’s cabinet members have already supported gay marriage, but Clinton is unlikely to do so for political reasons.
Felsenthal surmises Clinton is still leaving the door open for a White House run in 2016 and coming out for gay marriage may lessen her chances in the Iowa Caucus. Voters in Iowa, as Fiesenthal notes, removed in 2010 three Iowa Supreme Court justice who upheld the decision allowing gay marriage.
Fiesenthal writes that “when Clinton addressed a United Nations human-rights group in Geneva in December 2011,” she spoke of spoke about how gay rights were human rights, but “she specifically did not mention gay marriage in the United States or elsewhere.” Clinton was similarly political when she “did seem last year to endorse New York’s gay-marriage law, though she offered no country-wide endorsement.”
Other Democrats running for Senate in conservative states, such Obama’s former DNC Chairman Tim Kaine in Virginia, Bob Kerrey in Nebraska, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri, have not “evolved” on the issue of gay marriage as well.
It is only logical to assume that members of the president’s political party who have not “evolved” on the issue with him would feel more scrutiny and heat from the mainstream media than Republicans.
But the mainstream never wants to point out these inconsistencies in politicians who are on their liberal team, politicians they want to protect and never make uncomfortable.