Defenders of marriage shouldn’t be conned by President-elect Obama’s selection of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration. Although Obama claims to be against same-sex marriage, his opposition to California’s Proposition 8—which overturned the California supreme court’s invention of a state constitutional right to same-sex marriage—shows that he is content to acquiesce in judicial imposition of same-sex marriage. Further, it’s a safe bet that Obama’s appointees to the Supreme Court will support the invention of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage. (As illustrations, consider the records of two of the leading contenders for appointment, Harold Koh and Deval Patrick.)

So Obama isn’t against same-sex marriage. Rather, he’s against incurring the political costs of being candid about his support for (or non-opposition to) same-sex marriage.  On marriage as on many other issues, Obama, as an ardent supporter of liberal judicial activism, will look for his judicial appointees to impose illegitimately the policy preferences of the Left that he doesn’t have the courage (or foolhardiness) to pursue through the proper channels of representative government.  [Hour-later edit:  I’ve added the parenthetical phrase in the second sentence of this paragraph.]