President Joe Biden raised eyebrows this week when he claimed in an interview that his “epiphany” on same-sex marriage came when he was a senior in high school.
Biden recalled seeing two “well-dressed men in suits” kissing. His father explained that the men loved each other.
The problem with this account is that Biden did not endorse gay marriage until he was seeking a second term as vice president, about six months before his 70th birthday, after voting to ban the practice at the federal level and allow states to decline to recognize same-sex nuptials performed in other states.
Richard Grenell, a gay conservative who served as director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, called Biden’s recollection “a whopper of a lie.”
The story, recounted in an interview with actor and former White House staffer Kalpen Modi, was implausible on its face. Biden was a senior in high school in 1961. His father was born in 1915. Gay sex, much less gay marriage, was not protected by the Supreme Court until 2003, reversing a previous decision handed down in 1986, when Biden was serving his third Senate term.
This is not the first time the White House has engaged in revisionist history on Biden and same-sex marriage. “[T]his is something that he supports — this piece of legislation,” top Biden spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a daily press briefing last year. “And this is an issue, when it comes to marriage equality, that he has supported through — through his Senate days and as VP and now as president.”
As a candidate in 2020, Biden told a town hall in New Hampshire that he “didn’t have to evolve at all” on same-sex matrimony.
Biden did vote against some proposed constitutional amendments that would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. But he never supported same-sex marriage at any point in his 36-year Senate career and was nearly halfway through his two terms as vice president when he finally did so, shortly before former President Barack Obama announced a similar change of heart.
By that time, most Democrats supported gay marriage and a Supreme Court ruling declaring it a constitutional right was a little over two years away. Public support for same-sex marriage hit 60% in Gallup the month before that decision.
Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act as a senator from Delaware in 1996. It prevented the federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allowed states to deny recognition to same-sex marriages performed in other states without running afoul of the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.
If Biden changed his mind about gay marriage, he was hardly alone. When Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a Gallup poll found only 27% supported same-sex marriage. By June 2022, 71% did.
The Defense of Marriage Act passed the Senate by a vote of 85 to 14. The House vote for its enactment was 342 to 65. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law.
“Marriage is between a man and a woman,” Biden said in a 2006 Meet the Press interview that is less heralded than the one in which he reversed his position some six years later. He repeated that stance in his unsuccessful run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and as the party’s vice presidential pick on the ticket with Obama.
In the vice presidential debate with Republican Sarah Palin, Biden said he opposed “redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage.” Moderator Gwen Ifill followed up: “Let’s try to avoid nuance, senator. Do you support gay marriage?” Biden answered “no.”
Obama and Biden had hesitated because of residual opposition from Hispanic and especially black voters. Black Californians voted in 2008 for Obama and Biden — and also to define marriage as a man and a woman by passing the ballot initiative Proposition 8.
Biden is a Catholic who attends mass. Over a decade after he was a senior in high school, during his first Senate term, he told an interviewer, “My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known.”
The president’s misstatements about his past have drawn scrutiny previously, ending his first campaign for the White House in 1987.
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Biden’s evolution tracks with changes in public opinion. But he both denies his previous position and characterizes people as extremists if they held the same views he did for most of his public life, even as a senior citizen.
“I was the first major leader holding public office to call for same-sex marriage. So I don’t know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad,” he said in an early 2020 New Hampshire Democratic debate.
