A recent CBS/NYT poll has shown that 67 per cent of respondents were of the view that President Obama endorsed gay marriage because of political reasons.

The implication is twofold. If he did it for political reasons, it must have been with a positive political outcome in mind. The second implication, and one connected at the hip with the first, is that he, a politician, is being insincere. Almost all national polls taken since Obama’s gay endorsement have shown the GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney ahead of Obama but still within the sample margin of error.

There is a dissonance here, not necessarily in the poll findings but in the way the issue has been assimilated by Americans so far. First, even among Obama supporters, especially African-Americans, there is significant rigid adherence to the biblical belief that marriage can only be between one woman and one man. This view seems to be as strong as that held by the fanatical, non-cerebral white evangelical right in the Southern Republican states.

How therefore could the 67 per cent arrive at a view that Obama’s endorsement was made to elicit something politically positive when Obama and most Americans must have known that the deck was stacked against him in that delicate political issue? And what are we to make of the reputable Time magazine dubbing Obama as America’s first gay presidentâ on its cover?

The over 300 million people in the US have a luxury that their president, Barack Obama, a cool, politically calculating man, does not enjoy.

Individually they are free to hold various views on many socially sensitive matters like marriage and its inclusion on the gay calendar. They are also free to express strong and rigid positions on either side of it and still get to proceed normally with their lives and be politically unaffected.

As powerful as Barack Obama is (or because of it) he does not have the luxury of closeting or expressing his personal views on sensitive matters without major political consequences — positive or negative. First, as president, it is his duty to be aware of the huge multiplicities of political, cultural, social and religious views and constituencies which exist among the 50 states.

As a progressive president and one who has a duty to ensure that history is on his side, being the first African-American to hold that post, Obama is more forced to contend with issues that address inequities among minorities, him being a perfect example of one such minority.

As an African-American minority man, he could at no stage make it appear as if he came to the presidency specifically to deal with black issues, especially in an America whose power is defined by the military industrial complex and huge WASP transnational business interests. He had to be all-inclusive and walk through delicate political raindrops without getting soaked.

The real progressive in him could not be so much about imposing his personal viewpoints on others as much as it was to bring the majority into an appreciation of the rights of minorities.

Relative to Jamaica where it would prove socially tragic for two men to stroll into Half-Way-Tree holding hands, it is accepted that gays in the USA have as many rights as any heterosexual. In other words, they are equal under the law. Well, not quite.

In Western Christian culture where marriage is said to be ordained by Godâ traditional unions are one woman joined to one man. If we accept that gay people are a reality, that is, they did not press a button and make themselves so, and if it is further accepted that in the land of the free and the home of the brave all are equal under the law, the natural destination in the marriage trajectory is giving gays equal rights to marry.

I accept Obama’s explanation of his evolution to this position after much thought, simply because of my own evolution from my teen years (the only good b..y man is a dead one) to now in 2012 where I accept that homosexuality is a reality which no majority position, no referendum, no archaic biblical injunction can change or nullify.

I have not reached to a full acceptance of gay marriage because even now I cannot wrap my mind around two men in a coital embrace. That said, simply because I am heterosexual, does that give me the right to use the fact of my safe haven in a majority to deny a minority group its own right?

Recently while I was discussing the Obama decision with a Rasta friend of mine, a small-business owner, when I pointed out to him that Obama’s decision was not law but more a moral and human rights nudge, he simply said of gays, dem fi dead!.

Which is pretty much the same position of the clergy in Jamaica who are forced to pander to their myopic congregations, without them actually using the term, ‘off with their heads’.

Taking their cues from the Bible, which says in Ephesians 6:5, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ”, these black clergymen are conveniently forgetful that the slave masters of their foreparents has used the Bible, that extremely violent book, to justify holding them in bondage for hundreds of years.

The real simple matter is that many heterosexuals like me cannot get a good grip of the fact that just as how our desires reach boiling point for a highly attractive woman, so it is with homosexuals for their own sex. And, as I stated earlier, they did not all press a button to make themselves so, anymore than men pulled a switch to light up the for women onlyâ sign.

A little bit more education and intelligence leads to more tolerance. More religion leads to less tolerance — first for other religions, then to the blind acceptance of the incoherence, violence and brutality of archaic teachings.

The US president has the tough job of fighting off coded racism from a GOP which has descended into nothing more than a party totally captured by big business interests while struggling to explain himself to his own base, including blacks, readily captured and willing to be defined by the teachings of the white man’s Bible.

In 2008, Obama’s blackness and his eloquence, among other traits, were seen as an attractive novelty. In 2012, white America has awakened to the reality of his black face in the White House. With Romney offering exactly what Bush had made reality of and failed miserably at, and with Romney’s Mormon religion liberally sprinkled with anti-black teachings in its bible, Obama’s stance on gay marriage will only make his second term that much harder (but not impossible) to achieve.

— observemark@gmail.com