Obama and Gay Marriage: One Year Later: The New Yorker Vice-President Joe Biden came first. A year ago today, on May 6, 2012, he made his surprise announcement on "Meet the Press" that he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage, seemingly catching the White House off guard. Biden said ..."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." It is still somewhat of a mystery exactly why Biden said what he did. The White House spent the day trying to walk back his remarks, but that strategy did not hold up for long. To this day, the Administration claims that a decision was made in January, 2012, for the President to endorse same-sex marriage before the election, and that Biden had just gotten unintentionally out in front of it. Even so, it's not clear why the President was still waiting by the time Biden spoke. In any event, three days after Biden's comments, on Wednesday, May 9, 2012, President Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News, "For me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." In that first interview, Obama seemed to make a distinction between what he personally believed and what he thought was right for the country as a whole. "I have to tell you that part of my hesitation on this has also been I didn't want to nationalize the issue," he said then. What I'm saying is that different states are coming to different conclusions. But this debate is taking place, at a local level. And I think the whole country is evolving and changing. Over the course of the past year, that distinction has been dropped. The President's position in support of same-sex marriage reënergized the base of the Democratic Party and was, arguably, strategically important in his reelection. He went on to give an inaugural address that will be famous for its references to gay and lesbian equality, invoking Stonewall in the same sentence as Seneca Falls and Selma, touchstones of the women's and civil-rights movement. His Administration filed an important brief in the recent Supreme Court marriage cases that supported a constitutionally-based right to same-sex marriage, even if it stopped just short of advocating that all fifty states should be required to have marriage equality right away. Decisions in those cases, the most anticipated of the Supreme Court's term, are expected at the end of next month. And in a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Obama, when asked if he could think of a good reason for a state to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, responded simply, "I can't, personally. I cannot. Did the President's announcement a year ago accomplish so much, or did it merely reflect political and social changes already well underway? The answer is likely somewhere in between. Since Obama's statement, the debate around marriage equality has changed dramatically, more than anyone had predicted. Four additional states have adopted marriage equality. In Maine, Maryland, and Washington, state voters approved same-sex marriage initiatives - the first time this has been accomplished by popular vote. Rhode Island became the tenth and latest state with marriage equality last week, when its legislature passed a same-sex marriage bill, later signed by Governor Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican, now Independent. Delaware and Illinois are likely to see bills passed and signed into law before the end of this month. The same is possible in Minnesota. Roberta A. Kaplan, the lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court for Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case that seeks to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act, recently told me that she believed that the broader transformation we see "did not happen because Barrack Obama or any other politician led on this issue, but because they followed the same path as the rest of the country in their understanding of gay people as friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors." Last week, Kaplan spoke on a panel at a gay Wall Street conference called "Out on the Street - LGBT Leadership Summit," held at Goldman Sachs and co-sponsored by many other banks and financial-services companies. It had been nicknamed the "Gay Davos." Wall Street has seen its own transformation on gay inclusion. A number of conference participants told me that as recently as five years ago being openly gay at a big Wall Street firm was considered bad for your career. As a rule, that is no longer the case. Theodore Olson, the former Republican U.S. solicitor general who (together with his co-counsel, the Democrat David Boies) has been the mastermind behind the challenge to Proposition 8, California's same-sex marriage ban, and who argued that case before the Supreme Court, was also at the conference. As he was arriving for his panel, Olson told me, "we feel quite confident that whatever happens, we will be better off than when we started." While still hard to predict, the general consensus among legal commentators is that the Proposition 8 case is likely to be decided on procedural grounds. That could mean a ruling that the Prop 8 proponents lacked the required "standing" to pursue the case through the appellate courts, or an order that the appeal was "improvidently granted." In either case, same-sex marriage rights would likely return to California, perhaps after some period of additional clarifying litigation. How quickly this would happen, or even if it is certain to happen, is the subject of some legal theorizing. But Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog said that "as a practical matter, I would be very surprised if a same-sex couple had a problem getting married in California" after such a ruling. If California is added to the groups of states with marriage equality, that group would encompass almost twenty-eight per cent of the U.S. population. It seems very unlikely that there will a ruling upholding Prop 8. But also unlikely, based on the questions at oral argument, although slightly less so, is a broad holding along the lines that Olson and his plaintiffs have requested, establishing a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In that case, there may be some reflection. At a cost of well over ten million dollars in legal fees and other costs, was the Prop 8 litigation worth it? (Contrary to some popular belief, Olson, Boies, and their firms have worked at greatly reduced rates, but not for free. Kaplan and her firm, Paul Weiss, and the A.C.L.U., who represent Windsor together, are not charging her.) Could the money spent on the Prop 8 litigation have been better spent reëngaging the California electorate in a new initiative contest, in which, according to the polls, gay marriage would likely win today? The broader view is that even if the Prop 8 case does not bring a breakthrough ruling, it, like Obama's statement, has helped produce a dramatic shift in public opinion. Advocates are now facing a similar "court vs. ballot" question in New Jersey, where Governor Chris Christie has vetoed gay-marriage legislation, and essentially dared supporters to put it on the ballot and pass it rather than going to court. A new poll in New Jersey last month found that sixty-two per cent of respondents said they would vote for allowing same-sex marriage if it were on the ballot. It may be tempting to let the voters decide, even as gay legal groups staunchly maintain that civil-rights issues should not be put up for popular vote. Whatever happens to Prop 8, most experts believe that the Court will strike down DOMA, the ban on federal recognition of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages, as unconstitutional. The bet is that at least four justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) will strike it down on equal-protection grounds, and one or two (Kennedy, maybe Roberts) more will join them on federalism grounds, leaving perhaps a somewhat muddled precedent, but one bringing the end of federal non-recognition restrictions nonetheless. Some observers believe that Justice Kennedy might still be a fifth vote for an equal-protection-based ruling preferred by gay-rights advocates. The sheer distance that the issue has moved in the past year may find President Obama wondering, this week, why his own evolution took so long. Olson told me that Obama's announcement, a year ago Thursday, was "a historic breakthrough, a huge lift for the morale of everyone fighting for marriage equality, and an important moment in the legal proceedings." This was, in part, because of what his silence on the issue until then had meant: "Our opponents had repeatedly and persistently cited President Obama's stated antipathy," Olson told me. How could it be unconstitutional, they argued, if even the President was on their side? Richard Socarides is an attorney, political strategist, writer, and longtime gay-rights advocate. He served as White House Special Assistant and Senior Adviser during the Clinton Administration. Photograph by Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post/Getty