Richard Socarides considers the political imperative:
For a long time, Democrats have taken the gay vote for granted. Political consultants tell Democrats that gay and lesbian voters have nowhere else to go, and thus, in effect, can be counted on, so long as politicians pay lip service to the issue. But that is old thinking, out of touch with the new reality of the gay-rights movement. While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama, both with their votes and with their financial contributions, no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire—first on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and then on marriage equality.Dahlia Lithwick says the evolution leading to the decision matters just as much as the decision itself:
Taking his words at face value, what he was saying reflects precisely the thing Obama does at his best: He listens. My oracle at Facebook tells me that many of us think that is also precisely the thing Obama does worst—he compromises, triangulates, and negotiates. But perhaps we could at least stipulate that listening to and—yup, I’m saying it—empathizing with people who are very different from you, and rejiggering your views to accommodate them, is a quality we have seen almost none of in this presidential campaign, from either side. That isn’t to say that every person in the country deserves special solicitude on every policy question from every candidate. But it is to say that the quality whose absence Obama most lamented at the Supreme Court—empathy—has been vanishingly rare in this election cycle as well.And Andrew Sullivan's applauding words deserve repeating:
[Let] me simply say: I think of all the gay kids out there who now know they have their president on their side. I think of Maurice Sendak, who just died, whose decades-long relationship was never given the respect it deserved. I think of the centuries and decades in which gay people found it impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.(Image: "President Obama is seen on television monitors at the White House on Wednesday. Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press, via the Washington Post.)