CNN -It’s hard to believe today, when the vast majority of Americans support it, but just 20 years ago the issue of same-sex marriage divided the country and drove voter turnout. The vast majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage on May 17, 2004, when the first same-sex couples took their vows after a court decision in Massachusetts. The state’s Republican governor at the time, Mitt Romney, planned to invoke an archaic 1913 law in an attempt to bar same-sex couples from traveling from other states to obtain marriages in Massachusetts. Then-President George W. Bush, a Republican running for reelection, gave an address from the White House that year actively pushing to amend the US Constitution to “protect” marriage, which he described as “the most fundamental institution of civilization.” There was verifiable backlash to marriage equality in November 2004, when voters in 11 states – ranging from reliably red Utah to reliably blue Oregon – codified in their constitutions that marriage should be between a man and a woman...The 2015 Supreme Court case, Obergefell v. Hodges, by which a divided 5-4 court would ultimately grant a right to same-sex marriage, sprang up as a result of this Ohio amendment. In CNN exit polls for the presidential election in 2004, just a quarter of all American voters that year said they supported marriage rights for same-sex couples. A larger proportion, 35%, supported giving same-sex couples the ability to enter into civil unions. And 37% opposed legal recognition of same-sex unions. Barack Obama notably opposed same-sex marriage when he ran for president as a Democrat in the 2008 election and, as public opinion was rapidly shifting, changed his tune in 2012 to support same-sex unions.In eight years, the US went from the winning candidate (Bush in 2004) exploiting opposition to same-sex marriage to win reelection, to the winning candidate (Obama in 2012) changing his position to support marriage equality before winning reelection.
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