Obama is backing repeal of DOMA section 3 and section 2. Dan Savage's view:
I think it's great, very heartening, in part because it's clear that the cold, political calculations are adding up in our favor now. We're seeing significant political movement in our direction because it's not just the right thing to do, or the just thing, but because, in the long run, it's the politically smart thing to do.
Andrew Cohen gives credit to a federal judge who ruled DOMA unconstitutional last July. Of course, the unraveling of this law – which was an unconstitutional power-grab by the federal government over an institution, civil marriage, previously left to the states – has to be balanced by the GOP's increased, manic intransigence on the question. Almost every current Republican candidate is required to shudder at the very thought of gay people. The current GOP front-runner, Michele Bachmann, has views on gays that were only widely held in the 1950s and 1960s and were dropped by responsible and sane psychologists in the early 1970s. Her husband does incalculable damage to the souls and psyches of those he simultaneously calls "barbarians" – and charges for it. As the general public coalesces around a new consensus, the GOP has taken a stand far, far to the right of Ronald Reagan's in the 1970s. More to the point, their anti-gay extremism is intensifying.
But this is the result of a political party becoming a religious one. The world changes but doctrine cannot.
The Dish 