President Obama is apparently tired of pretending he opposes gay marriage. Good.
Good, because lying to the American people is always wrong, and because now the American people will have a clear choice: a president who supports gay marriage, or a president who sides with the majority of the American people, including 61 percent of North Carolinians.
I'm tired of pretending, too.
Conservative elites, including those at Fox News, have shamefully kowtowed to the politically correct opinion on gay marriage.
Some do so reluctantly because they have been cowed into believing defeat is inevitable.
Some do so because they think the "base" is wrong on gay marriage, and they want to bring the Republican Party slowly on board with their own avant-garde moral values.
Tuesday's vote in North Carolina should explode the cover of both camps.
By a margin of 22 points, the people of this moderate swing state that voted for Obama in 2008 decisively rejected gay marriage.
Both Obama and former President Bill Clinton came out strongly against the marriage amendment.
The GOP elites, including conservative elites? Nowhere to be found.
The marriage amendment outpolled Mitt Romney by approximately 18 points. Did he come out for the marriage amendment? No. The silence is deafening.
But Romney is not alone in his lack of courage. Not Ron Paul, not even (it saddens me to say) Rick Santorum showed the courage -- or the common sense -- to voice support for North Carolina's marriage amendment.
Fox News does not celebrate this victory. Sean Hannity does not celebrate this victory. Sarah Palin is not tweeting tonight on North Carolina. Laura Ingraham does not cover this issue.
Marriage is an orphan issue.
Elites are busy running from it, believing the fantasies spread by Human Rights Campaign and other gay marriage advocates that somehow an issue that garners the repeated majority support of Americans -- in every state from North Carolina to California -- is bad for the GOP.
Elites are running from marriage -- with one huge and notable exception: Rush Limbaugh.
On May 7, as Joe Biden was endorsing gay marriage, Limbaugh once again rushed in to state the obvious political consequences no one else is acknowledging:
"I tell you what they're doing. When they say that they are not interested in the votes of white working-class Americans, that's a big chunk. That's the old Reagan Democrats and so forth. White working-class voters -- the middle class, lower middle class -- they're not interested in that. They're not interested in the mainstream. They're not seeking reelection from the mainstream, unless the mainstream is the unemployed, college students and militant radical minorities."
Sometimes people ask me, given the wall of hatred now directed at anyone who opposes gay marriage, why do I continue to fight?
Two reasons:
The first and most important is that marriage matters. Gay marriage is based on a falsehood about human nature: Gay unions are not marriages -- they do not serve the same purpose as unions of husband and wife.
Gay marriage is a profoundly political creature -- an attempt to use government to redefine reality itself that is unjust and will have consequences.
The second equally important reason is this: I simply cannot stand to see the party of Ronald Reagan abandon the American people out of a misplaced deference to political correctness, fear and willful stupidity.
Tuesday, North Carolina became the 32nd state in a row to vote against gay marriage when its citizens were given the chance.
If gay marriage becomes a reality in this great nation, it will not be because the American people have not done everything they can to make their voices heard.