http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/75954.html
Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, sending his office into an immediate effort to clarify his comments as reflecting no change.
Asked on “Meet the Press” if his views on gay marriage had “evolved,” which is the word the president has used to describe his own thinking, Biden spoke forcefully about his own position.
“I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that,” Biden said.
The comments are the strongest so far from within the White House. Obama supports civil unions, but gay rights activists have been pushing him say more, especially as gay rights measures have been debated on the state level around the country. There’s growing frustration with Obama’s reluctance to embrace gay marriage — especially among supporters who believe that the president personally supports them, but is holding off saying so for political reasons.
Now Biden has added to the pressure, saying in his first interview since the president officially kicked off his reelection campaign with two rallies Saturday, that he believed more and more people were seeing gay marriage as “a simple proposition.”
“Who do you love? Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is: What all marriages, at their root, are about, whether they’re marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals,” Biden said.
Afterward, a Biden spokesperson said there was nothing new in what Biden said, and that there was no distance between his position and the president’s.