Former-Senior Advisor to President Obama David Axelrod admits in a new book that Obama lied about his opposition to gay marriage in order to become president.
"Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a 'sacred union,'"Axelrod writes in his new book, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.
"Having prided himself on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position," Axelrod continues.
Time's Zeke Miller notes that in 2006, then-state senate candidate Obama told a Chicago gay and lesbian newspaper, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."
It was only 12 years later, when he was seeking votes at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, that Obama said, "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix."
Obama maintained his false opposition to gay marriage until May 2012 when he told ABC News' he had "been going through an evolution on this issue."
"At a certain point I've just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," Obama explained.
The White House then avidly promoted Obama's new found enthusiasm for gay marriage, incorporating it into their reelection campaign outreach to Democratic constituencies like his 2012 Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program and the free birth control provisions of the Affordable Care Act.