VIDEO: Was Obama Lying When He Piously Professed His Belief in Natural Marriage?

By Peter LaBarbera

“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. [big audience applause] For me as a Christian it’s also a sacred union, you know, God’s in the mix….I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage.” — Barack Obama, Saddleback Church debate moderated by Rick Warren, August 20, 2008 [see video below]

According to new polls, more Americans than ever believe that their President lied to them about Obama-care. That is, he engaged in a calculated deception, repeatedly and emphatically asserting that Americans could keep their health insurance plans, period. Rush Limbaugh and others state the obvious in explaining why Obama lied: to get his controversial health-care bill passed in Congress. (Then later we could start reading it to find out what’s in it….)

Now it is time to think back to other Obama deceptions and crafty manipulations. Check out President Obama’s recent tweet below celebrating Illinois’ House vote in favor of legalizing homosexual “marriage”:

Obama went from being a pensive, faith-minded advocate of traditional marriage as “sacred” in 2008 — (after previously backing “gay marriage” as a 1995 state senate candidate) — to the full-out champion of homosexuality-based “marriage” he is today. Was Obama’s “Christian” opposition to this key homosexual agenda item just a charade? If it was an act, it was a good one; with the help of the media, it fooled a lot of Americans. [See 2008 video below.]

To put Obama’s radical metamorphosis on marriage in perspective, let’s go back to his famous, pious-sounding answer to mega-church pastor Rick Warren’s question, “What is marriage?” during his 2008 run for the presidency. It occurred at the August 16, 2008 debate with GOP candidate John McCain hosted by Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California — the ideal setting to burnish his “religious” credentials. (I should emphasize here that Obama is hardly unique among politicians in playing to religious people — and fibbing and deceiving — to get votes.) Below is a YouTube video of Obama in the Saddleback debate (his anser is excerpted at the top of this article);

A little context: Obama’s marriage contradiction

[Note: ever since this debate, this writer has faulted Warren for not following up on his question to Obama — who though professing loyalty to natural marriage was already actively undermining efforts to protect it in California. By letting Obama’s smooth, faith-oriented response rest (after Obama voiced his opposition to a federal Marriage Amendment) and moving on to the next question, Warren left the impression — widely repeated thereafter by the media — that Obama and McCain essentially agreed on same-sex “marriage” (both were “against” it). Sure, it was occasionally noted by the press that Obama backed “civil unions” and opposed a federal marriage amendment, the opposite of Sen. McCain — but the typical, simplistic media soundbite in the election was that both Obama and McCain “opposed gay marriage.”

[This reportage was misleading at best: Obama, unlike McCain, supported LGBT activist efforts to block statewide pro-family campaigns — like those in California — designed to protect the age-old definition of marriage constitutionally. Warren naively allowed to go unchallenged Obama’s fundamentally contradictory position of “supporting” historic marriage while simultaneously supporting the intensifying aggressive “gay” lobby’s efforts at the state level to undermine it.

[If Obama was truly for the historic definition of marriage, why did he do nothing to defend it in California? Keep in mind that “civil unions” were already the law in the Golden State during the Prop 8 efforts — so it was mainly about preserving the definition of marriage (although at the time that definition affected federal benefits). The liberal media and even most conservative pundits rarely made an issue during the 2008 campaign of Obama’s hollow ‘support’ for historic marriage even as he worked hand-in-hand with LGBT efforts to redefine it. (To be fair to Obama, lots of Democrats at the time, like him, professed support for marriage as between a man and a woman while pandering to LGBT activists whose number one agenda goal was to open marriage to homosexuals.)

[Upon assuming the presidency, Obama similarly would use (critics would say abuse) his power to undermine the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton) — by simply not enforcing its provision limiting federal benefits to real, man-woman marriage. That fueled the LGBT legal war on DOMA, leading to this year’s historic U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the DOMA provision that outlawed federal marriage benefits and recognition for homosexual couples.

[Moreover, Obama’s and his Attorney General, Eric Holder’s tactic of not enforcing DOMA has become the model for mostly Democratic officeholders to negate existing traditional-marriage laws in their respective states. This worked in California, where no Democratic statewide leader defended Proposition 8 — approved  52.24 to 47.76 percent by the state’s voters in 2008 to preserve marriage in California constitutionally as one-man, one-woman. The same day that the Supreme Court eviscerated DOMA, it paved the way for the invalidation of Californians’ Prop 8 vote by not allowing a private defense of the measure by pro-family advocates. In the wake of both the DOMA and Prop 8 Supreme Court decisions, Democrat governors and attorneys general in other states like New Mexico and Pennsylvania are fueling the pro-“gay marriage” agenda by simply following Obama’s and California’s lead by not defending or enforcing their state’s existing one-man, one-woman marriage laws.]

Did Obama Evolve on Marriage?

The media love to talk approvingly about Obama’s “evolution” on homosexual “marriage,” rather than his politically expedient duplicity and chicanery. That’s because most in the media support “gay marriage’ and celebrate any evolution that makes a candidate more in line with their cherished “progressive” positions on social issues.

But now that we have the benefit of hindsight with Obama’s track record of misrepresentations and manipulations, we must ask again: did candidate Obama in 2008 feign Christian loyalty to natural marriage to help himself get elected? Was it all an act?

It is true, per the above history of Obama’s meandering record on “gay marriage,” that anybody closely following the marriage issue in 2008 could discern that his equivocating positions were at war with themselves. It made no sense: “I support marriage as a sacred institution but will support all efforts by my LGBT friends to radically change it.” But in a soundbite age, campaigns are defined by images and quick impressions, and Obama’s “thoughtful” Saddleback soundbite (abetted by Warren’s doormat questioning) was crucial to his 2008 strategy of appearing far more moderate than he actually was — on homosexual “marriage,” just like so many other issues.

Obama, who announced his backing of homosexual “marriage” in May of 2012 [watch his ABC interview HERE], is certainly no reluctant homosexual “marriage” proponent now. As he moved to solidify his liberal base in 2012, “gay” political power — not God — was in the mix as our sitting president, with no pretense of moderation, shifted once more to take full advantage of the media-driven zeitgeist that celebrates All Thing Gay in the name of “fairness” and “equality.”

Obama kicked God to the curb, and was re-elected, although the media and the chattering political classes rarely dwelt on “gay marriage” or homosexual issues during the campaign, as America lurched further into a secular-libertarian mindset cultivated by an agnostic media and influenced by the weakening voice of the Church.

A telling story told by Rep. Peter Roskam

Obama advised then-fellow-State-Sen. Peter Roskam (R-IL) to become “less conservative” to run for office statewide in Democrat-dominated Illinois.

There is a story that has circulated in Illinois Republican circles involving Obama and Peter Roskam, the current U.S. Representative representing DuPage County, who served with Obama in the Illinois State Senate. The story, relayed by Roskam to fellow Republicans (this writer has heard it only second-hand), goes like this: the ambitious, then-State Sen. Obama — perhaps projecting to a rising star on the other side of the aisle — suggested to then-fellow State Sen. Roskam that he run for office statewide in Illinois. Roskam responded that he was “too conservative” to be elected to statewide office in the Democrat-dominated state. To which Obama responded (paraphrasing here): “Then why don’t you just become less conservative?”

Only God and Barack Obama know his real “evolution” on marriage, and whether he ever really believed, as a “Christian,” in genuine (man-woman) marriage. But given the abundant falsehoods, deceptions and misrepresentations that have characterized his presidency, it seems plausible that Obama’s famous “God is in the mix” marriage comment at the 2008 Saddleback Church debate was a calculated, well-performed example of Obama doing the opposite of his tactical advice to Roskam: becoming less liberal to win the national election.

And it worked. Obama’s politically-correct “evolution” on and ultimate embrace of homosexuality-based “marriage,”– an evolution away from God, let’s be clear —  is the single greatest factor in the growing  momentum of this revolutionary social experiment. This most radical pro-homosexual, pro-transgender president in American history helped deal a body blow to America’s collective morality by taking God “out of the mix” of this (still) sacred institution. His actions directly helped oxymoronic “gay marriage” win at the ballot box in 2012 in four states — Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and Washington (in Maryland, pro-same-sex-“marriage” forces ran ads with Blacks talking up Obama’s newfound support for the idea). And that decisive win on Election Day stoked the LGBT Lobby’s and the media’s favorite narrative: that “gay marriage” is inevitable.

But despite all the “gay” victories Obama has helped to achieve, he has paid a political price — in addition to the eternal one he surely will pay — for his falsehoods — or deliberately misleading statements, half-truths, con-artistry, lies, or whatever you wish to call them. Because although to most Americans, “calculated deceptions” — be they about  marriage or national health care — are expected of ambitious politicians, who are widely perceived as willing to do almost anything to get elected, eventually the public catches on. And nobody likes being lied to.

As we tell our children, eventually your lies will catch up with you, as Obama is finding out right now.