Jeb Bush: Gay marriage is a 'state decision'

With same-sex marriage set to take effect throughout Florida, Jeb Bush’s complicated take on the issue will likely come into focus. The ...

With same-sex marriage set to take effect throughout Florida, Jeb Bush’s complicated take on the issue will likely come into focus.
The former Florida governor who is actively considering a 2016 presidential bid told the Miami Herald this weekend that he believes gay marriage should be left to the states.
“It ought to be a local decision. I mean, a state decision,” Bush said in Sunday’s brief Miami interview. “The state decided. The people of the state decided. But it’s been overturned by the courts, I guess.”
Florida voters in 2008 passed an amendment to the state Constitution banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. Like other states, various court rulings have found the ban to violate the U.S. Constitution. A federal judge ruled that same-sex marriage will take effect in all of Florida’s 67 counties after midnight Tuesday, with the first gay marriages in Miami-Dade County beginning as early as Monday.
Bush has long believed in traditional marriage between one man and one woman. But in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Bush sounded open on the subject of gay parents. What he said then:

I don’t think people need to be discriminated against because they don’t share my belief on this, and if people love their children with all their heart and soul and that’s what they do and that’s how they organize their life that should be held up as examples for others to follow because we need it. We desperately need it and that can take all sorts of forms, it doesn’t have to take the one that I think should be sanctioned under law.

In remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013, Bush said Republicans need to be careful so they don’t come across as “anti” everything.
“Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker, and the list goes on and on and on,” Bush told CPAC. “Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates even though they share our core believes, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted and unwelcome in our party.”