Biden Repeats Story About How His Dad Was Pro-LGBT, Even Though He Went on to Oppose Gay Marriage for 39 Years

Every so often, President Joe Biden tells some variant of this story he recounted on Monday:

My dad was dropping me off to get a license to be a lifeguard in the city. We get out of the car in the center of the city, when we get out of the car, two guys leaned in and kissed each other. I’d never seen that before. I looked at my dad and he said “Joey, it’s simple: They love each other.” It’s simple, that’s my position.

We know that Biden worked as a lifeguard in the summer of 1962, so let’s say this happened around then, give or take a couple of years. That would have made Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. an extremely progressive man in his time. When Gallup first surveyed Americans about gay rights back in 1977, just 43% of the country thought that “gay or lesbian relations between consenting adults should be legal” and 14% thought that gay and lesbians should be allowed to adopt children.

And that’s to say nothing of the idea of marriage, which had been defined as it was a union between one man and one woman for generations at that point.

For more context on just how much of an outlier that would have made the elder Biden, consider that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both opposed gay marriage when they ran for president in 2008, the same year that saw California — yes, California(!) — vote in favor of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage even as Obama sailed into the White House on a blue wave. Shortly before that, Biden restated his decades-long opposition to gay marriage during his vice-presidential debate with Republican nominee Sarah Palin.

Eventually, Biden reversed himself during in 2012, declaring that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage after 39 years of opposing it in federal office.

Of course, it’s possible that Biden’s dad wouldn’t have supported gay marriage, even if he supported LGBT Americans’ right to live their lives free from hate crimes and other forms of especially pernicious discrimination. But that’s not quite how the president frames it. He said “I looked at my dad and he said ‘Joey, it’s simple: They love each other,'” then he equated his position with his dad’s — “It’s simple, that’s my position.”

I note all this is not to condemn Biden for his prior position or his reversal, but to profess some confusion over this experience he supposedly shared with his father over a half century ago.

If the story is true, Biden apparently didn’t take his father’s words to heart. While his dad planted a flag decades before public opinion caught up with his own view, Biden staked out a more politically expedient position, even going so far as to vote for measures like the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and to reaffirm his support for it in 2006.

And if the story isn’t true, why is he telling it?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.