Barack Obama and the bending arc of gay marriage.

Seemingly from nowhere, the issue of gay marriage was raised last week in the United States when Joe Biden, the loose-tongued Vice President, declared he was “absolutely comfortable” granting same-sex couples the rights and benefits of marriage hitherto enjoyed only by heterosexuals. When it rains it pours: soon afterwards, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, also expressed his support for gay marriage. The president’s famously “evolving” views on gay marriage – the subject of many cubic metres of journalistic scorn – reached their terminus. He became the first president in history to formally endorse allowing same-sex couples to marry, telling ABC that “it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

A historic and important and laudable stance most of us would agree, but it all needs to be unpacked. First of all, Obama reiterated his belief that, though he believes same-sex couples should be able to marry, at no point can I remember (though I will happily be proven wrong) did he say his administration would take the steps necessary to confer such a right. This is because the president has taken an unusually federalist stance on the issue, believing it to be a state-by-state matter. A cancer patient smoking medicinal marijuana would quickly discover the overriding supremacy of the federal government, and likely find himself incarcerated in one of America’s overcrowded prisons. But the establishment and distribution of marital benefits is a state-by-state issue for the president. A bizarrely incongruous position, then.

In no fewer than 44 U.S. states are same-sex couples prohibited from marrying. As many have pointed out, there is a compelling case to be made under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, that, as the federal government actively prohibits same-sex couples from marrying solely based on whether or not the state they reside in recognises such marriages, gay people are being actively discriminated against. In short, the president’s position is all of a bit of a dodge. While he has endorsed gay marriage (again, a stance that is welcomed) he supports the right of marriage to be applied arbitrarily depending on which state someone lives in and a person’s sexual orientation. And I shouldn’t even have to point out that slavery and abortion were both formerly state-by-state issues.

Gay rights has admittedly come quite some way under president Obama, chiefly through the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, and the Justice Department’s refusal to enforce the Defence of Marriage Act (though this has not been repealed as yet). In 1996, just over a quarter of Americans supported gay marriage; today this figure stands at around 50 per cent. The views of the American people have been evolving alongside those of their commander-in-chief. But this leads me to my second point.

Martin Luther King Jr. observed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” At just the moment when the right of same-sex marriage is becoming increasingly accepted in the wider body politic, it may have to endure a setback. Previously you wouldn’t have been able to get an anorexic cigarette paper between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s substantive views on homosexuality and gay marriage. Things may now change, the ideological waters parting. Romney and senior Republicans have now reaffirmed their opposition. Thoughtful (or at least disinterested) Republicans and libertarians will likely now have to adhere to the party line this election year, as gay marriage goes from a moderately divisive issue to yet another weapon in the long-fought culture wars. North Carolina voted strongly in favour of a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to between a man and a woman; a bill legalising civil unions in Colorado never even made it out of committee.

I could well be wrong. Those who met the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage with the most opprobrium were never going to be in the blue camp anyway; very few Democrats will decline the president their vote in November after his announcement, and certainly none on the left of the party over this issue. It is also not, let us be honest, an issue of great importance for the majority of American people right now. There’s perhaps a case to be made that Obama’s announcement helped rekindle the cultural divide, forcing Romney on the back foot – the former governor of Massachusetts is notoriously bad at lobbing out great chunks of red meat for his party’s partisans to devour. Any back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis would likely conclude this announcement won’t have hurt Obama’s re-election chances much. Yes it was a half-assed endorsement, and about bloody time too, but it was nonetheless an important moment. Voter turnout will almost certainly increase; the political bases will be full of ideological beans. We just need an election to sort it all out.