Obama opposes same-sex marriage. Awful.

Yet another instance when I wonder why Faux Noose always refers to President Obama as a liberal, when he consistently and loudly distances from what would truly be liberal.

Here we have conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents ruling in favor of gay marriage, and a Democratic President opposes gay marriage?  How twisted is this scenario?  I understand that it is all politics at a presidential level.  But, come on ...

Senior adviser David Axelrod said the president supports "equality" for gay and lesbian couples, but did not address directly Obama's position on Wednesday's court ruling, which struck down as unconstitutional California's Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in the state.
"The president does oppose same-sex marriage, but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples, and benefits and other issues, and that has been effectuated in federal agencies under his control," Axelrod said on MSNBC.

The last Democratic President before Obama, Bill Clinton that is, signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, according to which the federal government recognizes marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Personally, as I have blogged earlier, I believe that a government has no authority to "recognize" marriages.  The government's job is to merely ensure that the contractual agreement that two adults enter into is faithfully carried out.  The government is not in the job of making the contract a holy sacrament--for those who need that recognition, well, we have all kinds of religious institutions that provide that.  In my world, whether it is heterosexuals or homosexuals, we all get the same "civil union" contractual registration filed with the government.  End of story.

Update (Aug 6th) David Harsanyi writes:

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made "state registration and church consecration" a dual requirement of matrimony.
We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn't it about time we freed marriage from the state?
Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman—or no one at all—and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called, and go about the business of their lives.

And, to quote, again, Martha Nussbaum (ht):

Should the state be in the business of dignifying certain unions? The answer would be no. If we were starting over again, we'd want to go back and look at the privileges associated with marriage--tax benefits, immigration status, etc.-- and ask, Who do we want to give those benefits to? What do we want to do? That kind of thorough rethinking would be ideal, but it's also not likely to actually happen. How do we get from where we are to there? In the short run, I think the best thing is just to push on the equality issue and say, So long as marriage is offered by the state, it should be offered with an even hand.

I have said this before, and I bet I will say it many time over in the future:  the law is a ass--a idiot :)