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Notes -
I'm probably around your age or a little younger, as I had very recently graduated college in 2008, and most of my peers were around my age. We were in Massachusetts, which had already legalized gay marriage by that point, and our perception was that gay marriage was so obviously a human right (it was vanishingly rare to encounter people socially who didn't agree with this - the few times we did, that person was usually socially ostracized by people within my circle - I was never enough of a social butterfly to have much influence over or feel much impact of these decisions) that either mainstream Dem politicians who were against it and for civil unions were just making cynical, calculated decisions to misrepresent their true beliefs for the purpose of not scaring off the superstitious/bigoted conservatives (including the more conservative/religious Democratic voters) or were just superstitious/bigoted themselves due to clinging to religion.
For Obama specifically, we almost definitely projected a lot of our own values onto him as the avatar of Hope and Change who would lead us out of the dark Bush 2 years. With gay marriage, we thought it was basically an open secret that he was cynically lying about his opposition to it, and plenty of us, including myself, also had a lot of confidence that he was actually an atheist cynically lying about his faith in Christianity.
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