I’m not in the habit of quoting the Daily Mail, but this headline caught my eye: “Former top presidential adviser says Obama LIED about his support for gay marriage for years so he could get elected.”

Gosh, the use of caps lock really drives the point home, doesn’t it?

Anyway, it’s an interesting allegation:

Longtime Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod writes in his new memoir that Barack Obama lied about his position on gay marriage so he could get elected president in 2008.

And documents reveal that Obama responded to a questionnaire in 1996 from the Chicago-based Outlines newspaper, as he was making his first run for the state Senate in Illinois, that he strongly favored legalizing same-sex unions.

‘I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,’ Obama wrote then.

Two years later, though, as his political future began to take shape, he told the same newspaper that he was ‘undecided.’

In 2008, under the glare of a presidential campaign and the weight of history, his public rhetoric swung to a position that America’s Bible belt could embrace – support for only a traditional definition of marriage.

But as president in 2010 he returned publicly to his original position 14 years after he first articulated it.

Oh, and if you’re thinking this is some sort of smear job against the president, Axelrod also apparently says it was at least partly his idea:

Axelrod writes in ‘Believer: My Forty Years in Politics’ that he told the future president in 2008 that he should hide the ball and deceive the American public for political purposes.

So was Obama in the wrong for lying about his beliefs because lying violates the categorical imperative? (Lies do make baby Jesus cry, after all.)

Via Meme Generator

Or should we be more angry at a bass-ackward society that would make anyone think hiding their support for marriage equality is necessary to get elected in the first place?

I’m torn, because as annoyed as I am with the bass-ackwards elements of our society, this door swings both ways—recent history has certainly shown that religious conservatives have no problem whatsoever with lying to get what they want. Then again, those folks are going to lie no matter what moral conclusion I make here.

So I guess I don’t know just yet. Discuss.