President Joe Biden has often told some variant of this story he recounted on Monday via Mediaite:
My dad was dropping me off to get a license to be a lifeguard in the city. We get out of the car in the center of the city, when we get out of the car, two guys leaned in and kissed each other. I’d never seen that before. I looked at my dad and he said “Joey, it’s simple: They love each other.” It’s simple, that’s my position.
It is noted that Biden worked as a lifeguard in the summer of 1962 and it can be assumed that it happened around then. That would have made Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. an extremely progressive man in his time. When Gallup first surveyed Americans about gay rights back in 1977, just 43% of the country thought that “gay or lesbian relations between consenting adults should be legal” and 14% thought that gay and lesbians should be allowed to adopt children.
For more context on just how much of a progressive man that would have made the elder Biden, consider that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed gay marriage when they ran for president in 2008, the same year that saw California vote in favor of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage even as Obama sailed into the White House on a blue wave.
Before that, Biden restated his decades-long opposition to gay marriage during his vice-presidential debate with Republican nominee Sarah Palin.
Eventually, Biden reversed himself during in 2012, declaring that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage after 39 years of opposing it in federal office.
There is a possibility that Biden’s dad wouldn’t have supported gay marriage, even if he supported LGBT Americans’ right to live their lives free from hate crimes and other forms of especially pernicious discrimination.
However, that’s not quite how the president frames it. He said “I looked at my dad and he said ‘Joey, it’s simple: They love each other,’” then he equated his position with his dad’s — “It’s simple, that’s my position.”
If the story is true, Biden didn’t take his father’s words to heart.
