The wrong question, but still the right answer

Early this week, the same video kept popping up on my Facebook wall. It's from a press conference in Greensboro, at which North Carolina NAACP president William Barber (whom the Century profiled here) made a crucial point: "How do you feel, personally, about same-sex marriage?" is the wrong question. The right question is about equal rights under the U.S. Constitution and federal law:

By midweek, my Facebook wall was overwhelmed with comments (and links) about President Obama's decision to give the right answer to the wrong question. Personally, the president supports same-sex marriage. As a matter of public policy, he says he wants to leave it to the states (since that's always proved a foolproof way of moving the equal-rights ball forward). This is essentially what Dick Cheney said in 2004.