"Obama Admits His Daughters Helped Change His Position On Marriage Equality"

huffingtonpost.com

"President Barack Obama revealed on Saturday that his children helped him understand why embracing civil unions was not the same as endorsing marriage equality.

Obama came into office supporting civil unions, but it wasn’t until 2012, with a little nudge from Vice President Joe Biden, that he came out in favor of same-sex marriage.

The president said that he initially didn’t think the labels for same-sex couples really mattered as long as they had the same rights as heterosexuals. Sasha and Malia helped him see why that wasn’t the case.

'I have to confess my children generally had an impact on me,' he said during a town hall in London. 'People I loved who were in monogamous same-sex relationships explained to me what I should have understood earlier, which is it was not simply about legal rights but about a sense of stigma, that if you’re calling it something different it means that somehow it means less in the eyes of society.'

Obama described the marriage equality movement as 'the fastest set of changes in terms of a social movement that I’ve seen.'"