Chris Dodd changes his mind; supports gay marriage

Chris Dodd wrote today in an op-ed in the Meriden Record-Journal that he is now in support of gay marriage. You can read it on his Senate website.

"Public officials aren’t supposed to change their minds," Dodd wrote. "But I firmly believe that it’s important to keep learning."

While I’ve long been for extending every benefit of marriage to same-sex couples, I have in the past drawn a distinction between a marriage-like status (“civil unions”) and full marriage rights.

The reason was simple: I was raised to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. And as many other Americans have realized as they’ve struggled to reconcile the principle of fairness with the lessons they learned early in life, that’s not an easy thing to overcome.

But the fact that I was raised a certain way just isn’t a good enough reason to stand in the way of fairness anymore.

The Connecticut Supreme Court, of course, has ruled that such a distinction holds no merit under the law. And the Court is right.