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Subscribe to RSSGov. Chris Christie, R-NJ., joins Morning Joe to discuss Wednesday night's GOP debate in Arizona, why he thinks Rick Santorum had an "awful night" at the debate, and why he vetoed a bill allowing same-sex marriage in New Jersey.
Following his veto of a bill allowing gay marriage in his state, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie accused Democrats of playing politics with the issue and said his stance is no different than President Obama's.
"I have the exact same position as the president … The Democrats in my state are criticizing me, saying my feet are firmly planted on the wrong side of justice. I said yesterday, 'Yeah, my feet are firmly planted right next to President Obama." And they don’t criticize him," Christie said on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe."
Christie defended his view that voters should be the ones who decide what defines marriage in his state.
"Even though it’s against my belief on this, I’m willing to be governed on it [by the voters]," Christie said.
Last Friday, Christie vetoed a bill that would have allowed gay marriage in the state. The Republican governor accompanied his veto with a call for lawmakers to appoint an advocate for same-sex couples under the state's existing civil union law.
Obama, on the other hand, has been coy on the subject of gay marriage, Christie insisted. Obama has supported strengthening civil unions, just as he has, but hasn’t gone further than that, Christie said.
"The president has hidden on this issue," Christie told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. "The president opposes same-sex marriage."
Harold Ford, Jr., a former Democratic congressman, also on the show, pointed out that Obama applauded New York’s decision to approve gay marriage.
"So he applauds other people’s courage, but doesn’t have any of his own," Christie shot back.
Christie reiterated that he would respect the people’s will if the measure passed in a statewide referendum.
"You need three-fifths of the state Legislature to get it on the ballot, and I’ve called on every Republican to vote yes, to put it on the ballot," he said.
"Morning Joe" contributor Jonathan Capehart, an openly gay Washington Post columnist, confronted Christie.
"I heard you say that you have your feet firmly planted next to President Obama on this issue, but the key difference between you and the president is that while you support putting the civil rights of that minority up for a public referendum, the president is not in favor of that," Capehart said.
"Has he said that, Jonathan? … Have you heard him say it?" asked Christie. "He’s silent on this issue like he is on every issue that is difficult for him."
This article includes reporting by msnbc.com's Elizabeth Chuck and Reuters.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News
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Here we go with another misleading headline. The author makes it sound like the Governor and the President are having tea and walking in the Garden Of Eden when in fact if you absorb the comments made in the full article they couldn't be farther apart. Christie still opposes gay marriage, Obama is lying low in the swamp hoping to get re-elected, then jump up and shout "I want a gay marriage bill on my desk by the end of the year!".
What a huge pussy. You get elected to do a job not pass the buck back to the people who elected you.
New Jersey is in the top 10 of worst state budgets problems and he has time to worry about gay marriage,not a big fan of Christie as the more the spotlight shines on him the further he gets from what the people want.Before the name calling starts I've been a registered indy all my life,10 presidential elections and I have voted both ways
I have not heard a single interview where Gov. Christie was nice or pleasant. He is loud, obnoxious and rude. He refuses to answer questions and talks over everyone else. BIG BULLY.
Maybe they like rude in NJ but it would not go over well here.
Sounds like you're describing a Liberal.
Angie: The Governor absolutely has an answer for every question, it's just not what you want him to say. Now if you want to see someone dodge questions tune into Jay Carney when he gives the daily WH press briefing.
NJ was a disaster before Chirsty. It is better. So all of you who criticize obviously do not know the issues or are uneducated dumb@$@ liberals who are of low iq and unable to perform simple analyses.
Let's hope he never runs for a nation wide office. This man is an abomination and bigot.
It was extremely courageous (politically) as in if the mission failed, it would have been a political nightmare as the same Republicans who hack away at all of the good things that President Obama has done, would be screaming bloody murder about how he bungled it; they were'nt screaming when Bushco dropped the ball pulling majority of military resources out of Afghanistan in 2003 to wrongfully deploy in Iraq uner false prestense of "WMD". It was Obama who got Osama, not Bushco/they wanted to keep that American public afraid of the big bad wolf, because fear justified their illegal & immoral actions for the better part of 8 years, allowing them easier control of public perception...
Well my first reactio -nwell at least SOME republican AGREES withthe President on something! It's a start.
Then when I see the fine print I'm not so sure. Christie will to put right up for a referdum. What would have happened in the south in the1960's if you put segragtion up to a referndum in the south? It would pass overwhemingly and you've never have black people gain rights-because they wouldn't be able to vote in thef irst place.
And Obama would never have got to be President.
Sorry-right are rights and you don't put them up for referendum-you fight for them. they are YOURS. The idea that rights exist only ifa majoritys ays so makes rights meaniless. In Nazi Germany it would have meant to Jews could not speak out; it would mean that the Holocaust would be OK-because the majority-with captive media told them to vote yes.
Trusting rightst o a majority puts rights at the whims of a majoarity.When the majority changes-you no longer have rights. That like folding up the umbrella when it rains.
You cannot trust you rrigh tto anyone else. You can only trust you rrights to yourself. As the consistution says they are SELF EVIDENT. what that means is they stand by them selves-like beaty and truth. They exist because they exsist-not by somebody's roll call vote.
Govenemnets-the costitution says -exsits to SECURE the rights. Not make the rights. To insure the continued existence of the rights.
Gov Chritie doesn't understand the basicc oncept of rights.
And that's why the republican Party has lost its way.
Since there are still states that allow marriage of very young individuals, does that mean that homosexual marriage will be permitted at the same age? Pedophiles will cheer the permission for homosexual marriage if that's true.
Are heterosexual pedophiles (and the overwhelming majority of pedophiles are heterosexuals) cheering the states that currently allow marriage of very young individuals? I really don't hear about it being much of a problem now and I doubt it'll be much of a problem once same sex marriage equality comes into force.
Proamerica::: And the parents of the minor must consent to it. But it is NOT to a very young individual. No judge would allow it, tho I guess they still allow such things in the hillbilly states.
Once again the hypocritical intolerant Left states their view is the only acceptable view. In the Progressive world all traffic is one-way.
You are entirely entitled to a different view, but our laws must reflect our rights as outlined in the constitution. I could care less if you are a bigot to your dying day, but legislate against civil rights and I have a big issue.
and in traffic like in politics slower traffic (minds) keep to the right.
gays should be allowed to marry. there are plenty of gays in NJ. and Chisty should realize that those vote won't be there for him in the future.
Leviticus 18:22 - "Thou shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination
Leviticus 20:13 - "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have comitted an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be on them."
Homosexuallity is wrong. Do not mock (marriage) by making perverse which God has made holy!
Hate the sin, not the sinner.
To be a true Christian is to forgive one sins as we wish to be forgiven. It does not mean we must accept ones sin as something normal.
stop trying to force your superstition on everyone else. post all the BS from your book you want, it does not influence me as to me it's just more words trying to force us to live how YOU see fit.
Marriage is a civil issue. I do not believe in your god, and was not married in a church, yet I am married still.
And in issues of the state, god has no place. We are a secular nation. If you don't like it, Iran is a place you'd fit in nicely.
Obviously you did not understand..."Hate the sin, not the sinner." Islam does not forgive.
But it is Ok. The day will come when all is laid bare and YOU will have to explain to your creator that you do not believe in him. What will you say I wonder?
Highly unlikely. In the meantime you will waste your one and only life believing in faerie tales. How sad.
i'll be silent cause i don't talk when no one is there, that's insane.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21........Kill your disobedient children.
Yep, that bronze-age Jewish book of fairy tales makes lots of sense.
Actually I understand this quite well. I hate christianity, but have no ill will toward christians.
Evenstar::: Oh, so your religion and your black book condones swapping partners, taking from one what is his and making her mine, kicking your wife to the curb when she is ill so you can marry your shack job. If that is what your religion teaches, I am glad I don't belong to your religion.
Tsk tsk, you didn't capitalize the C in creator or the H in him! STONE THE BLASPHEMER!
Heh, I kid, I kid.
I think I'd be asking "Hey.. 'S the coffee any good in Hell? Oh, I hope I get to work on my tan a little, my skin has always been a little on the pale side. I BLAME YOU! Thanks though for great boyfriend! Ta ta~!"
To put the boyfriend comment into context, I'm gay by the way. (Heh, I'm a poet and I didn't know it!)
he's fully for letting the people decide while asking his republican friends to vote to put it on the ballot and knowing they won't. it's easy to say you're for something when you know that something will never happen and you'll never have to prove you were for it.
I don't care which side of the aisle you hail from, civil rights cannot be voted on.
it was already voted on when obama took away our rights to live free with his healthcare disaster.
fred201: and exactly how many people have been jailed (i.e., had their right to live free taken away) over healthcare reform?
Christie brags about being about being a Lawyer because that makes him so tough! Suit and Tie guy! Oooh wow! When he joins the Military then I'll be impressed! When he has the balls to run for President then I'll be impressed. Right now he is proving himself to be a bully who governs one state - a little different than trying to be President. Not that he's not right that the President has been "coy" about his stance. I guess the President just isn't the type to think that being the loudest and most obnoxious guy in the conversation makes him right. I used to like Christie before he cut off his balls to support Mitt Romney, to take money from the Government for the floods/disasters in Jersey but now says - 'it's a complex issue' regarding Obama's support of the bail out of the Auto industry versus Romney's Plan. Sound like a bully doing his best to parse a situation - just what he accuses Obama of doing. Chicken @!$%# is - as Chicken @!$%# does - it doesn't matter whether you are a Republican or Democrat. And sometimes Governing is suppressing your personal beliefs to stand up for what is right for others. As has been said elsewhere - African Americans and women wouldn't be where they are today if RIGHTS (meaning justice) was ONLY controlled by what the Majority/The Powerful believed. Hell we'd still be part of Great Britain.
And it's not a very large state.
when did marriage become a civil right?
the moment it was created.
There have been many cases which define it as a civil right, most notably Loving v Virginia.
Adam Henry
Exactly .00001 of a second after the IRS granted special taxation for married couples.
Loving v. Virginia
"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."
Christie decided to do this because he doesn't want to put his head in the chopping block with the GOP. They way the party has become a haven of right wing extremists and super conservatives, he knows that it's political suicide to sign anything that would support gay marriage, even if it's the right thing to do. If he puts it up for a vote he can blame it on the electorate. I hope that if he puts it on a vote the people of New Jersey will do the right thing, but all the religions crazies will campaign hard to defeat it. I think the issue of gay marriage will end up in the Supreme Court and even if they are super conservative, they still can't deny the constitution. I believe the SCOTUS will make the right choice, well, all except that Thomas guy. Gay marriage will be legal, eventually.
Folks, big picture here. In the presidential election of 2004, there were propositions on the ballots in 11 states regarding gay marriage. Most of the 11 states could be considered "swing" states. The Governor is taking his cue from the strategy book of Karl Rove and perhaps angling for a VP spot on the Republican ticket. Put gay marriage on the New Jersey ballot (a move which brings out conservative voters) and select him as VP for the ticket and suddenly New Jersey's electoral votes are up for grabs.
Calling the Governor names is insulting. He is very smart and a shrewd politician.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_same-sex_unions_in_New_Jersey
People in civil unions in NJ have virtually all the same rights as married couples, and the state will advocate for people in these unions if they are denied benefits by an employer. Mr. Christie has not attempted to take away these rights from people in civil unions. What this really comes down to is the DEFINITION of marriage. It truly means between a man and a woman. I fully support granting all of the same rights to same sex couples as married couples. But it occurred to me a couple days ago when this was happening here in Jersey, that same sex couples truly don't fit the definition of the word "marriage". If we look at the definition of "woman", it says that it's a person who is biologically female; that is, capable of bearing offspring. It the case of a transgender male, no matter what he does to change himself physically through hormones and or surgery, he could never be DEFINED as a woman. Though he and everyone around him could CONSIDER him a woman. That was just an illustration of how the definition of something cannot change, I wasn't attempting to work that into the gay marriage issue. When I stop and think about this, I wonder why homosexuals who've fought for gay rights would even WANT to enter into a marriage as it's a heterosexual institution.
Can we have civil unions for mixed-race couples too? Where would be the harm in that?
Yea, well SCOTUS has already ruled that 'seperate but equal' doesn't cut it.
Julie::: Capable of bearing offspring? Then I guess a woman who is physically unable to bear offspring is not a woman. If that is so, then WTF is she then?
Oh, only heterosexuals can have the pleasure of companionship, caressing. Is having brats the only reason for marriage? If that is what your idea of marriage is, then I guess my husband and I didn't have a true marriage of 15 years-- ended by death.
Get off your high horse and quit trying to tell people how to live their lives. Is anybody dictating to you how you should live your life? No, that is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is guaranteed. Why can't it be guaranteed to ALL?
Virtually does not mean the same. And separate but equal is not equal.
Marriage, a civil contract, is not the same as Holy Matrimony, a religious contract.
Susie, you missed my point. I'm not on a "high horse" and I certainly don't have any desire to tell others how to live their lives. I was attempting to find the logic behind Mr. Christie's argument and veto. I was looking at it as an issue of semantics. You may have missed the part where I wrote that I support equality. Same sex couples SHOULD be allowed to marry, and I'm sure 20 years from now we'll all look back and think how archaic it was not to allow it. As far as defining a woman as being capable of bearing children, the idea is that a woman has a uterus and ovaries. Yes, women get hysterectomy's, oophorectomy's, some are born without a uterus and or ovaries, and nobody would say those women are not technically female. As soon as something in my comment ruffled your feathers, I think it's safe to say that you didn't look for logic, you just got mad.
Same-sex sex is deviant sex behavior. Government and society should not condone or support it.
Many things are "deviant" behaviours, and yet we don't deny marriage to people who engage in them. People into orgies, bondage, water-sports, scat, anal, etc can all get married (and routinely do).
But if they are the same sex, thats just not allowed!
God does not condone ignorance, arrogance, prejudice or exclusion.
That's just people like you, Nevada.
Your hate is a disease and I, for one, will not be infected by it.
God will surely punish this nation for its immorality and defiance.
Yup, but he gave us a free pass when we killed all the natives, institute slavery, jim crow laws, etc.
I must say, god has been very diligent.
Perhaps you should study the native cultures as I have and then perhaps you will understand that your view of them is not as sweet as you would like to believe. The barbarity committed in their fires upon prisoners was beyond cruel! It needed to be eradicated! The Aztecs, Mayans were such peaceable people as they ripped the still beating hearts out of their captives was, how shall we say - civilized.
Also, abolitionists were not secular, they were Christians, who worked to end slavery and many died in the civil war to bring that detestable institution to an end.
I'm sorry, your ignorance is showing!
their barbarity is only matched by our own. giving small pox infested articles to them and killing them off for nothing more than being on land that we wanted. your bias is showing.
I certainly was not commenting on their guilt as a people, merely our own. And any time we infect women and children after subjugating a people it is unjustifiable. The fact that you are able to condone genocide is a testament to the mental disease that religion is.
Secondly, I thought your god was all powerful? Why didn't he figure out a way to gentrify the "savages" instead of relying upon white man genocide. Your lack of logical thought is showing!
evenstar: And Christians never burned anybody (at the stake)????????
dslsca::: And evenstar's christians never murdered blacks just because they were blacks, never burned black churches just because they were black places of worship, never murder gays just because they are gay?
To Gov Christie: Why do we elect people to represent us in the state and federal governments? Why bother having elections at all? Majority rule by the masses is the true cop-out.
Scum would prefer to have a deviant, immoral minority rule.
Morality is subjective, Nevada, and your bigotry is extremely immoral. And we are not a country of majority rule.
I very much doubt that Obama would think it proper to put the civil rights of a minority up for a vote by the majority. Instead, he'd say what the mayor of Newark recently said in response to Christie's bigoted comments:
It should also be noted that Obama came out in full support of marriage equality in 1995, twice. His current politically ambiguous position is just to satisfy the ignorant rubes, but his actions on DOMA and gay rights speak much louder than his words. And unlike Christie, a President has no direct control over a state's marital laws.
Perhaps the rest of us should vote on whether Christie's mixed-obesity marriage should be allowed.
Sorry but NJ governor has it right. He said cheek in cheek with Obama. He and Obama are worthless.
The Governor does have on up on Obama, he at least said put it to a vote, where as Obama, just dictated that relgions organizations HAVE to comply with his socialist mandate. Where by stepping over the line on separation of church and state.
Steven100 = another misinformed American who doesn't have a basic understanding of the Constitution, but that doesn't stop him from regurgitating tired, unoriginal and completely baseless rhetoric...i.e., the language of know-nothing cowards.
How is not allowing employers to step between a Doctor and their Patient stepping over the line of the separation of church and state? Details, and Case Law, please, would be appreciated.
From my vantage point the only thing Gov. Christie is concerned about is how many donuts a human being can eat!
I think he is a Closet Queen. By his veto, he doesn't have to explain himself. It's our country great. The same people that tell you, you can't(or shouldn't) have abortions. Don't want to allow all those babies that will be born the right to health care as they grow up. But also who they fall in love with. It's pretty hard to understand where they are coming from. Or yeh! It's that GOD crap... why do people follow a "man" that let his "only" son die? LOL
I agree Resmad. It is unbelievable that in this time that people still believe in such things.