Barack Obama isn’t exactly famous for his loyalty; he has a history of jettisoning people once they’ve outlived their usefulness to him. This time, it’s the gay community.

On Friday, Obama told an MTV audience that he would not fight for gay marriage his second term, intoning that “it would be up to future generations of Americans to implement meaningful reform.”

Here’s the kicker; realizing that some states are now endorsing gay marriage, Obama suddenly became a champion of states’ rights, asserting, “For us to try to legislate federally into this area is probably the wrong way to go.”

When the states endorse Obama’s positions, he’s a states’ rights guy. When they don’t, he runs roughshod over them with the federal government.

Obama continued on Friday:

First of all, I’ve been very clear about my belief that same-sex couples have to be treated before the eyes of the law the same way as heterosexual couples. I think that’s the right thing to do. It’s based on my personal experience, seeing loving couples who are committed to each other, raising kids and are just outstanding people. And I was supportive of civil unions, but they taught me, if you’re using different words, if you’re somehow singling them out, they don’t feel true equality.

Obama says he’s been very clear? About as clear as mud. In May he raked in huge amounts of funding from the gay community and their supporters in May when he endorsed gay marriage. But before that time he had been a veritable ping-pong ball on the issue, vacillating wildly to reach whichever position was politically advantageous at the time. In 1996, as a state senator in Illinois he supported gay marriage. Yet in 2004, when he ran for the United States Senate, he was against it, saying:

“What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman … What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing something before God, and it’s not simply the two persons who are meeting.”

Then when he ran for president in 2008, he took the middle road, supporting civil unions:

“My feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have.”

That statement came two months after he told liberal bloggers that he was “unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage.”

The gay community won’t leave Obama over his sudden abandonment of championing their agenda at the federal level. But the absolute fickleness of this man and the insidious way he changes his positions in order to suit his ruthless pursuit of power should be frightening to any prospective supporters.