Encouraging numbers from a new TIME/ABT poll: National support for same-sex marriage is up to 42 percent, with the 51 percent opposition only barely mustering a majority. Gay marriage has moved from the fringes only a few years ago to being within eyeshot of parity. And opposition to an anti-SSM amendment to the U.S. Constitution now runs 58 percent.
Maybe that's why Barack Obama, who has previously said he thinks marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples, has come out against a California state constitutional initiative to do exactly that. In California, Gov. Schwarzenegger is performing the same straddle—that is, opposing gay marriage but also opposing the effort to overturn it.
As IGF contributor Dale Carpenter points out over at volokh.com, being both anti-SSM and anti-anti-SSM makes little sense logically in a world where the policy is either to have SSM or not. But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. The politicians are straddling because the climate of opinion is shifting. Obama and Schwarzenegger are barometers.