Biden gets a pass on the “epiphany” of gay marriage

President Biden gives very few interviews, but stopping by the Daily Show must have seemed like an easy layup.

To make it even simpler, the innkeeper was someone who had worked in the Obama-Biden administration, Kal Penn. It couldn’t be more comfortable.

Biden, who urged Penn to marry his longtime boyfriend, was asked about his evolution on marriage equality. During this interrogation, the President described his “epiphany.”

As is often the case, Biden recalled an anecdote about his father.

BIDEN TAKES HEAT TO REPEAT GAY MARRIAGE STORY ‘EPIPHANY’: ‘LIERS ABOUT SUCH THINGS ALL THE TIME’

He was a high school senior who was being taken to school when he saw two men in suits kissing. “And I’ll never forget, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, ‘Joey, it’s easy. They love each other.’ It’s simple. No I’m not kidding. It’s simple, they love each other. And it’s never been, it’s never been, it’s just that simple, it doesn’t matter if it’s a same-sex couple or a straight couple “You should be able to be married. So what’s the problem?”

Now even a hard-edged comedian could have pulled off the obvious sequel.

But as some experts have pointed out, the story doesn’t end there.

Biden “has spoken out against same-sex marriage for half a century, both as a Senator and as Vice President,” he writes Mediaites Isaac Schorr.

BIDEN TELLS SEVERAL VERSIONS OF THE INFAMOUS “EPIPHANY” STORY OF GAY MARRIAGE IN FACT CHECK

President Biden shared a story on The Daily Show about how he and his father saw a gay couple in public. (Gabe Ginsberg/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

In 1996, Biden voted in favor of Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. It banned the federal government from recognizing same-sex couples, barred them from numerous perks, and allowed states to refuse to recognize couples whose marriages were considered legal in other states.

A decade later, Biden opposed then-President George W. Bush’s proposed constitutional amendment that barred same-sex marriage — his own nod to the right — but only on the grounds that it was unnecessary.

“You see,” Biden said on Meet the Press, “marriage is between one man and one woman, and states have to respect that. No one has broken this law; there was no challenge to this law; why do we need a constitutional amendment? ”

Biden was not alone in his stance on marriage. In 2008, Barack Obama and his comrades made it clear that they did not support gay marriage.

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Four years later, the vice president famously forestalled his boss, who had planned to announce a dramatic change in his position. In “Meet the Press,” Biden said gay men deserve the same rights as everyone else: “That’s what all marriages are about at the root, whether it’s lesbian, gay or straight marriages.”

Obama quickly followed suit.

But while it’s easy to blame Biden for failing to live up to his beliefs over the years, let me suggest another perspective.

When Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, gay marriage wasn’t even a weak option in American politics. In fact, it was a time when many gay people kept secretive for fear of losing their jobs.

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If Biden had started speaking out in favor of same-sex marriage, he would have become a one-term senator.

When Clinton took office two decades later, the idea of ​​an acceptable compromise was that gays could serve in the military as long as they didn’t admit they were gay — Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

In 2000, it was considered a major victory when a Vermont Supreme Court order allowed gays to form unions that gave them certain legal rights.

It wasn’t until 2008, after a California court briefly made same-sex marriage legal in that state, that voters overturned it in a referendum called Proposition 8.

It wasn’t until 2012 that political gravity had shifted enough to make it safe for mainstream Democrats to embrace same-sex marriage. And since the Supreme Court legalized it in 2015, it’s become a settled issue accepted – if not loved – by most Americans.

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Biden obviously could have done more sooner, but politicians can’t be too far ahead of public opinion if they want to bring about change. As with his early take on bus driving, he never intended to become a card-carrying member of the party’s liberal wing.

That’s why he’s kept quiet about his high school epiphany for so long — not that his Daily Show pal was rude enough to point it out.