David Axelrod, the president's two-time campaign strategist, said in his new memoir that Obama lied when he told the nation in 2008 that he was against same-sex marriage.
According to Time magazine, Axelrod revealed that Obama's support for gay marriage goes back to at least 1996, when then-state senate candidate Obama responded affirmatively to a questionnaire prompt that said, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."
The questionnaire was previously known of, having become a subject of controversy in 2011. Back then, however, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said that it was filled out by someone else. Axelrod's comments now seem to contradict that disavowal.
In the book, Axelrod explains how they handled Obama's 2008 campaign strategy regarding his true position.
"Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a 'sacred union,'" wrote Axelrod.
Breitbart.com noted that the new revelations show that Obama was not only willing to lie about his policy on same-sex marriage, but also his faith.
In 2004, then-U.S. Senate candidate Obama told a Chicago news station that, "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."
In 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama told pastor Rick Warren the same. "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. For me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix," he said at the time.
During that same campaign, Axelrod said that Obama told him he was "just not very good at bullsh**ing," however he went on to lie about his position for years.