Rand Paul silent on gay marriage ruling

Ted Cruz called for impeachment. Bobby Jindal said he’d “just get rid of the court” entirely. Scott Walker floated a constitutional amendment. Mike Huckabee hinted at civil disobedience.

But well over 24 hours after the Supreme Court’s historic ruling making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states, one Republican 2016 candidate has thus far remained silent: Rand Paul.


While other GOP hopefuls bashed the high court’s decision to one degree or another, the Kentucky senator didn’t say anything or release a statement or respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Paul’s silence stands in contrast to his voluble response on Thursday, when the justices upheld a key part of the Affordable Care Act. He released a statement saying the decision “turns both the rule of law and common sense on its head.” He was still going on Friday afternoon, tweeting, “while some in my party may want to wave the white flag, I am more determined than ever to fight for total repeal of Obamacare.” No tweets, however, on gay marriage.

By Saturday, Paul had also tweeted about his poll numbers and the “hackathon for liberty and privacy” sponsored by his campaign and made numerous requests for donation.

Again, though, there was no mention of gay marriage or the high court’s landmark ruling earlier that day — on any of the candidate’s many social media accounts.

Paul’s habit of initial silence on the hot political topic of the day has been noted by the national press recently, especially his delayed response to Mitt Romney’s call for the Confederate flag to be taken down from the Capitol grounds in South Carolina. Paul finally weighed in on Tuesday, days after Romney’s Saturday tweet, and well after his rivals had already made statements. The Kentucky senator’s silence on the gay marriage ruling fits the pattern.

Paul hasn’t refrained from talking about gay marriage before, however. In April, in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Paul said he believed “people ought to be treated fairly under the law” but also said he believed in the “traditional religious connotation” of marriage, usually defined by religious conservatives as between a man and a woman.

“And you probably could have both,” Paul added. “You could have both traditional marriage, which I believe in. And then you could also have the neutrality of the law that allows people to have contracts with another.”

In a 2013 interview with the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, Paul voiced reservations about “federalizing” same-sex marriage.

“I’m not sure exactly how I’d come down on the federalization part,” Paul said in the January 2013 interview. “My fear is that in federalizing it, we’re going to lose the battle for the whole country. In keeping it state by state, which is the way marriage has always been adjudicated, we’ll have states that continue to have traditional marriage. I think we’re losing in large areas of the country now. If the urban areas are able to dictate, for the rest of the country, what our definition of marriage is, I’m really concerned about that.”