I think you’d be hard pressed to find a religious person who would agree that you can lie about your beliefs and be religious. The only example I can think of is to save your life.
I believe he never gave a hang about gay marriage, and as a christian found it ridiculous and repellent; but when the figures added up Mr. Obama had a Paul at Damascus epiphany when he understood supporting it would get him more support than opposing it. He evolved his political position.
That’s pragmatism, not hypocrisy.
It would have been pragmatism if he’d been surrendering to reality. The GOP candidates have mostly been pretty soft on gay marriage: not endorsing it, but not really opposing it either, except for the hard core fundie ones like Huck and Carson. That’s pragmatism. It’s weak, and equivocating, which doesn’t reflect well on them, but they aren’t outright lying about what they believe or what they’ll do.
Obama’s personal belief was that gays should have the same rights on marriage as everyone else. He didn’t say that he opposed gay marriage as a matter of just policy. He said he opposed it as a matter of religious faith. After Axelrod outed him, he changed his justification. Now he says he did it because of “religious sensibilities of others”.
Depends on how hard they have to work at believing the lies. Take the Planned Parenthood bullshit ‘sting’ videos. They were edited within an inch of their life to give the impression that PP was making money off of fetal tissue, and violating the law to boot. And not only did that quickly become widely known, but ditto the fact that this conversation had happened a year earlier, but nobody had reported these ‘crimes’ to the authorities in the meantime. But your side keeps believing the original claims, and your politicians are rushing to defund PP based on these lies.
So I say the typical GOP voter is quite willing to put up with their politicians’ lies. I bet you don’t repudiate Jeb & Co. either.
Same thing for climate change. Nonbelief in anthropogenic climate change has become a tribal identifier, and the evidence has ceased to matter. All the people on their side don’t believe in it, and that’s that.
So your side puts up with politicians’ lies - hell, it demands those lies.
Oh, and Trump’s bullshit about illegal immigrants being criminals and rapists and such - your side believes these lies because they want to believe them, that’s all. They are aggressively uninterested in the evidence. And it goes beyond Trump’s 25% support; his favorables with Republicans have lately swung from way negative to way positive.
And y’all re-elected Bush after you either knew he was lying, or were being willfully ignorant.
ETA: And your side’s lies are often big lies, and are regularly harmful lies. Not penny-ante stuff like claiming to have been at an airport when it was under fire. See above.
Is there another set of GOP candidates we’ve not heard of? Rubio was one of the prime movers behind Amendment 2 in Florida (when he was Speaker of the Florida House). Bobby Jindal was even more defiant than Huckabee after Obergefell, and demanded a constitutional amendment to re-ban SSM. Jeb! supported the ill-fated federal marriage amendment when he was governor of Florida.
You can’t go after their recent past, because in the recent past all of the major political candidates for both parties were opposed to same sex marriage because they were deeply religious people, don’t you know.
Personally opposed =/= supporting a constitutional amendment to ban it
Which ones support that right now? That’s all that matters if we’re using a fair standard.
We await the astonishing answer with bated breath.