Chris Dodd Flips on Gay Marriage

Remember the anti-gay marriage stance Chris Dodd took during his presidential bid? It’s apparently become a liability in his senate reelection bid so he’s now in favor of gay marriage:

Public officials aren’t supposed to change their minds. But I firmly believe that it’s important to keep learning. Last week, while I was in Connecticut meeting with members of the gay and lesbian community from across the state, I had the opportunity to tell them what I’ve learned about marriage, and about equality.

While I’ve long been for extending every benefit of marriage to same-sex couples, I have in the past drawn a distinction between a marriage-like status (“civil unions”) and full marriage rights.

The reason was simple: I was raised to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. And as many other Americans have realized as they’ve struggled to reconcile the principle of fairness with the lessons they learned early in life, that’s not an easy thing to overcome.

But the fact that I was raised a certain way just isn’t a good enough reason to stand in the way of fairness anymore.

The Connecticut Supreme Court, of course, has ruled that such a distinction holds no merit under the law. And the Court is right.

Say what? No one has ever argued that public officials can’t “change their minds”… Public officials can and do change their mind all the time. That’s not the issue, as Jim Geraghty says:

It’s the craven, sudden about-faces, taken in response to shifting poll numbers, that spur the cynicism and the snickering.

You know, like when a senator runs for president and takes a position on gay marriage that’s designed to get him into national office — you know, opposing it, but insisting that the same “traditional view of marriage” that stirs him to oppose it leaves a loophole for civil unions — and then throws it away when he faces a tough reelection campaign in his home state.

And there in lies my problem with Sen Dodd’s flip-flop… I’m pretty much an agnostic on the issue of gay marriage but I don’t believe a minute Chris Dodd’s change of position has anything to with fairness or principle. It has everything to with political expediency, he’s facing what maybe the toughest reelection fight of his political career so he’s pandering to every interest group he can in effort to garner their support.

Simply put Chris Dodd is the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with our political class… When it was in his political interest to be opposed to gay marriage he was. Now that it’s in his political interests to be a supporter of  gay marriage he is. The man is nothing if not a profile in political courage!