High On Quack

Duck’s thoughts on North Carolina:

I will not give up on that state. I will not write off the entire population including the thousands of people who worked hard to get the word out to vote against that amendment. I will not write off the entire Christian population, because I know that many of the activists against the amendment were Christian.

There are a lot of liberal pages that are angry right now, and I don’t blame them. I’m angry that the ridiculously harsh and redundent law was passed.

But you know what I’m going to do? BE ACTIVE. I’m going to continue to be an activist for human rights, for gay civil rights, and for people being oppressed everywhere. They want to keep gays out? Let’s open the damn flood gates and all go there in droves. Let’s start parading in their streets with pride flags, and grocery lists, and churches, parents, supporters, friends and children.

LET US NOT GIVE UP ON THE PEOPLE OF NORTH CAROLINA AND DOING THE RIGHT THING.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on Sunday that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriages and was heartened by their growing acceptance across the country, a position that moves well beyond the “evolving” views that President Obama has said he holds on the issue.

The comments, which aides described as the off-the-cuff views of a vice president not known for fidelity to a script, sent the White House scrambling to clarify that Mr. Biden was not articulating an official change in policy, a reaction that highlighted the administration’s unease over the subject.

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Biden invoked some of the same language that advocates of same-sex marriage use, speaking of family, equality and love.

“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Mr. Biden said, while noting that the president, not he, sets policy on such matters.

Mr. Biden’s unexpectedly expansive remarks made him by far the highest-ranking White House official to move closer to a formal embrace of same-sex marriage, which is now legal in six states and the District of Columbia but is unrecognized by the federal government. The Obama administration has endorsed civil unions but not marriage for gay couples.

The vice president’s comments are likely to intensify pressure on Mr. Obama, who says he is still wrestling with his feelings about same-sex marriage, to take a clearer stance on it before the presidential election this fall, something the White House has shown reluctance to do.

Mr. Biden’s aides, in insisting that he was not deviating from White House policy, pointed to a 2010 statement by the vice president that the country was moving toward a “national consensus” on same-sex marriage. And in Sunday’s interview, Mr. Biden did not say explicitly that the federal government should recognize it.

But gay rights advocates, who spent Sunday morning parsing Mr. Biden’s words, said the president’s running mate had, in their analysis, conveyed new and unmistakable support for their biggest cause.

Mr. Biden called the debate surrounding the issue a simple question of “who do you love?” and “and will you be loyal to the person you love?”

“That’s what people are finding out is what, what all marriages, at their root, are about,” he said, “Whether they’re marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.”