The announcement comes days after Vice President Joe Biden’s comments that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage put new pressure on Obama to clarify his position on the issue.

Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts Wednesday: “Over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that 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.”

Obama’s new position realigns him with the growing number of Democratic officials who have embraced full marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples. Gay rights activists have widely believed that the president privately supported same-sex marriages, but withheld a public declaration out of concerns about alienating independent voters in key swing states.

There is a movement among activists in the party to adopt a so-called marriage equality plank in the official platform this summer. Such language would mark the continuance of the party’s own evolution. In 2000, the Democratic platform stated simply that the party supported “the full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of the nation,” and “an equitable alignment of benefits.”

In 2004, in the face of an effort supported by the Bush campaign to put gay marriage bans to statewide referendums across the country, the Democratic platform stated that marriage “has been defined at the state level for 200 years, and we believe it should continue to be defined there.”

By 2008, the party vowed to “enact a comprehensive bipartisan employment non-discrimination act,” and opposed the Defense of Marriage Act “and all attempts to use this issue to divide us.”

It has been nearly a year and a half since Obama first indicated that his stance against gay marriage had begun to evolve. Obama has in fact taken multiple stances on the issue. In 1996, as a candidate for the state Senate in Illinois, he told a gay rights group that he favored same-sex marriages and would fight efforts to block them. As a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama said he believed marriage is between a man and a woman, citing his faith as the underpinning reason for that belief.

In 2008, he repeated that assertion to influential evangelical pastor Rick Warren, adding “for me as a Christian it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” But Obama also said he would not support an amendment adding that definition to the Constitution.

Defining marriage “has been a matter of state law. That has been our tradition,” he said. At the same time, Obama opposed a California ballot initiative outlawing same-sex marriage because it was “divisive and discriminatory.”

Obama had plenty of company in such murky waters. All of his top competitors for his party’s nomination drew the same line — opposing marriage and arguing that civil unions were sufficient to protect the legal rights of gay couples.

Since then, Obama’s party has steadily drifted away from that position — and the president tried to suggest, without stating clearly, that he’s moving with it. In October 2010, during a question-and-answer session with progressive bloggers, Obama first signaled he was reconsidering his previous position.

“I am a strong supporter of civil unions. As you say, I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” he told Joe Sudbay of AmericaBlog. “But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships. I have staff members who are in committed, monogamous relationships, who are raising children, who are wonderful parents.”

At a news conference nearly two months later, after he signed a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Obama restated his “baseline” position, support for “a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have.”

“I think that’s the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward,” he said.

The president’s stated “evolution” was widely viewed as a wink and a nod to gay rights activists. Still, the president’s advisors gave no indication that they planned to come out with a new stance before the November election.

Biden’s comments appeared to shift that calculus. While the White House claimed the remarks were essentially a restatement of the president’s position, it was obvious they were everything the president’s stance was not: open and clear.

As the issue snowballed, Biden’s comments demonstrated how difficult Obama’s “evolution” would be to explain in a debate — as the president will undoubtedly be asked to do — or even in a media briefing, as White House spokesman Jay Carney experienced in a spirited media briefing filled with elliptical or incomplete answers.

On Monday, Republican National Committee chairman said the episode exposed an authenticity problem for the president. Publicly at least, Obama shared the same position as Mitt Romney, that marriage should be between one man and one woman.

“He doesn’t want to fully embrace what his vice president is saying, but he wants the benefit of what the vice president is saying,” he told MSNBC. “People just aren’t buying what he’s selling because they don’t believe he’s real anymore, that it’s politics. And he has become the ultimate Washington politician, and this latest episode in regard to gay marriage is a great example of that.”

michael.memoli@latimes.com

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

National Journal explains:

On Wednesday the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the new bill, which would repeal all three sections of DOMA — which federally defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman — including section 1, which is the name; section 2, which instructs states not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states; and section 3, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing legally performed same-sex marriages.

Section 3 is the one that the administration recently decided was unconstitutional and stopped defending in court. Now Obama wants the whole thing “off the books once and for all,” in Carney’s words.

This means it’s time to write some more checks, rich gay donors! As if you didn’t get that.

Jim Newell – Gawker

Gay-rights advocates were hopeful that the same-sex marriage bill, which had been approved by the State Assembly and supported by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, would win passage before lawmakers ended their annual session.

The prospects for a vote remained unclear. Several Republican and Democratic senators predicted there would be a vote in the early hours of Friday morning. But Republicans, who control the chamber, had not yet met to make a decision about whether to allow a vote on the measure.

By 9 p.m. Thursday, the number of senators who had voiced support for the measure — 31 out of 62, or one short of a majority — had not changed in over a week. And negotiations over protections for religious institutions that oppose same-sex marriage had yielded no final agreement between Republicans and Mr. Cuomo, raising the prospect that the Legislature could adjourn without addressing the controversial measure.

“We’re not going to work under time constraints,” Dean G. Skelos, the Republican Senate leader and an opponent of same-sex marriage, said Thursday. “We’ll do it when the conference is ready.”

Two Republican senators, James S. Alesi of Monroe County and Roy J. McDonald of the capital region, joined 29 Democrats last week in saying they would vote for same-sex marriage if it came to the Senate floor.

Same-sex marriage advocates have focused since then on trying to win over the several Republican senators who have publicly described themselves as undecided or are considered open to persuasion: Stephen M. Saland, a veteran lawmaker from the Hudson Valley; Mark J. Grisanti, a freshman whose Buffalo district is overwhelmingly Democratic; and John J. Flanagan of Long Island. Mr. Saland and Mr. Flanagan both voted against the bill in 2009, when the Senate overwhelmingly rejected same-sex marriage.

“My position hasn’t changed,” Mr. Flanagan said Thursday.

Two other Republican swing votes, Gregory R. Ball of Putnam County and Andrew J. Lanza of Staten Island, appear to be less open to voting yes, but are still being courted by same-sex marriage proponents, several lobbyists on the measure said.

But Mr. Ball said in an e-mail on Thursday evening that he expected to vote against same-sex marriage.

“Now that the final text is becoming public, I am proud that I have secured some strong protections for religious institutions and basic protections for religious organizations,” he said. “Yet the bill obviously seems to lack many of the basic religious protections I thought vital, and for this reason, and as I did in the Assembly, I will probably be voting ‘no.’ ”

Strategists on the pro-gay-marriage side have also courted a second group of lawmakers who are firmly opposed to the measure but have indicated they would be inclined to let it come to the floor for an up-or-down vote, in part to dampen charges of obstructionism against the bill by the Senate majority.

But controversial bills rarely go to a vote in the Senate unless a majority of lawmakers first reach an internal consensus to bring them to the floor.

“I hope the bill fails, but I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Hugh T. Farley, a long-serving Republican from Schenectady.

Most Republican senators say they strongly oppose the measure on religious or moral grounds. Still others are worried that it would provoke a spate of primary challenges — or low turnout among conservatives — next year, when Republicans will be battling to retain their one-vote Senate majority in newly redrawn legislative districts that could prove less hospitable to long-serving incumbents.

“It’s a sore point,” said Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who opposes the measure. “Some people have feelings toward it. Some people don’t think we should even touch it.”

But supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage were also preparing for another possibility: a sudden vote on same-sex marriage called late Thursday or early Friday.

Mr. Alesi, who has been feted by gay-rights advocates in recent days after he become the first Republican senator in the state to back the marriage bill, said he believed the issue was too important, the pressure on his colleagues too great, for the Senate to block a vote.

“I don’t see how the conference doesn’t bring this to the floor at this point,” Mr. Alesi said. “I respect the collective will of my conference, but I believe on an issue as important as this to the Republican Party as well as to the L.G.B.T. community, I feel our conference has to bring this bill to the floor.”

Nicholas Confessore – The NY Times