Vice President Joe Biden’s endorsement of same-sex marriage dominated the news on Monday and was only bolstered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s blunt and unexpected support for the issue during an early appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Reporters quickly turned their focus to the White House, where they grilled Press Secretary Jay Carney on whether President Obama has evolved to embrace the freedom to marry and derided the administration for adopting a “cynical” strategy of protecting the marriage rights of all people without openly supporting the right of gay people to marry.

A ThinkProgress analysis of cable news coverage of the Biden story from Monday at 6:00 AM to 11:59 PM using TV Eyes shows that while MSNBC ran the most segments with the word “marriage,” conservative firebrand Fox News also devoted substantial airtime to the story. Almost without exception, the coverage criticized the administration for obfuscating on the issue without challenging Biden’s support for same-sex marriage or debating the policy merits of the issue.

Even Fox News — which ran the only segment in which a guest claimed that marriage equality would lead to a nation where “one person can marry 3 people” — focused on the politics of the debate and avoided labeling Biden or other Democrats who have embraced same-sex marriage as extremists. The network typically eschews LGBT-friendly stories altogether:

The tenor of the conversation is in sharp contrast to the hysterical and often times offensive remarks made about gay people during the 2004 election — when the Bush campaign sought to employ marriage is a way to rally its conservative electoral base — and may reflect the popular shift towards equality.

For instance, a recent survey from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that support for marriage equality has increased substantially since 2004, with 47 percent of Americans now favoring same-sex marriage — up from 31 percent in 2004. Pew also found that for the first time, “there is as much strong support as strong opposition to gay marriage. In the current survey, 22 percent say they strongly support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally; an identical percentage (22 percent) strongly opposes gay marriage. In 2008, there was about twice as much strong opposition to as strong support for gay marriage (30 percent vs. 14 percent).”

This growing public sentiment for the freedom to marry, the burgeoning political support for the issue, and the tepid tone of the media conversation all reinforce the notion that the freedom to marry has become a mainstream political position that — while still rife with political pitfalls among some constituents — is now treated as a legitimate establishment view.

NOM's Brian Brown

Opponents of marriage equality are not happy that Vice President Joe Biden expressed his support for marriage equality yesterday. They’ve taken to Twitter and other outlets today to mock the White House, accusing Biden of being off-message and reiterating their standard anti-gay talking points. Here’s a selection:

BRYAN FISCHER: President Obama is a homophobic bigot: won’t endorse gay marriage like the enlightened Joe Biden. http://ow.ly/aJYqJ

TONY PERKINS: Ok, Mr. Vice President, how about 3′s Company? Two Guys & a Girl? Sitcoms are the inspiration for this admin’s policies? I’m not laughing!

BRIAN BROWN: It’s always hard to know what Vice President Biden is doing whenever he speaks. He could be launching a trial balloon, or he could just be being Biden with his foot in his mouth again. Whether he realizes it or not, Biden is declaring war on  those 30 states in America that have adopted constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman… What Joe Biden wants—genderless marriage that kowtows to the demands of gay couples—cannot exist alongside traditional marriage.

Such aggrandizing rhetoric unsurprisingly distorts the entire conversation on the freedom to marry. For simply wanting all couples to have the “same exact rights,” Biden is “declaring war” and promoting polygamy? Hardly.

The Obama campaign has insisted that Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks about marriage equality echoed President Obama’s belief that gay and lesbians should be treated equally under the law. Senior adviser David Axelrod told reporters that Biden’s statements “were entirely consistent with the president’s position, which is that couples who are married, whether they’re gay or heterosexual couples, are entitled to the very same rights and very same liberties.” Obama and Biden, he insisted, are still evolving in their support for marriage equality, but believe that discriminatory measures like the Defense of Marriage Act are “unconstitutional and that if people are married we ought to recognize those marriages and afford them the rights to which they’re entitled.”

But this afternoon, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter seemed to admit that Biden’s remarks did in fact go further than the administration’s stated position:

MITCHELL: The question to Joe Biden was not about civil unions. The question to Joe Biden was about marriage. Marriage is different from civil rights, civil unions, equal protection under the law. Marriage is a sacrament and a legal sacrament that the Vice President was asked about it and he said he had no problem with it. That is not the same.

CUTTER: He said he had no problem with committed couples forming….he was really impressing the same policies as this president, as this administration….

MITCHELL: [Biden said] ‘I’m absolutely comfortable with men marrying men and women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same equal rights.”… Is the President of the United States comfortable, as the Vice President said, ‘with men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying another’?

CUTTER: Andrea, I’m not going to make news on the president’s views on gay marriage today.

Watch it:

On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden taped an interview with Meet The Press, in which he endorsed same-sex marriage and admitted to host David Gregory that he is “absolutely comfortable with…men marrying men, women marrying women.”

The comments came just as the LGBT community had grown frustrated with President Obama’s alleged evolution toward supporting marriage equality and admonished the administration for failing to issue an executive order that would have prohibited employers who contract with the federal government from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

But rather than finally confronting those who oppose granting gay and lesbian people all of the same legal rights and protections of their heterosexual counterparts and embracing Biden’s remarks, the White House and the campaign — after two days of considering their response — settled on pretending they didn’t happen. After the segment aired Sunday morning, administration officials hurriedly tweeted that Biden’s position was consistant with Obama’s. They said that had not endorsed full equality after all and implied that his claim that gays are “entitled to the same exact rights” apparently didn’t extend to marriage. The message beecame even more confused after one official told NBC’s Chuck Todd that Biden was only speaking for “himself” on the issue:

– HE WAS ONLY SPEAKING FOR HIMSELF: As NBC’s Chuck Todd revealed following Biden’t interview, “the Vice President’s office reached out to me to say, yes we know the vice president was speaking about himself. He is not speaking speaking for the administration. And they pointed out like the president he is evolving on this issue.”

– HE DID NOT ENDORSE MARRIAGE: David Axelrod tweeted, “@chucktodd @meetthepress What VP said-that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights-is precisely POTUS’s position.”

– HE IS STILL EVOLVING ON MARRIAGE: “The vice president was saying what the president has said previously – that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to rollback those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it. Beyond that, the Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.

And so the joy that LGBT advocate groups felt upon hearing Biden’s remarks turned to confusion. The Center for American Progress’ Winnie Stachelberg noted that while “We commend Vice President Biden for supporting marriage equality and call on President Obama to do the same. The campaign shouldn’t force Biden’s comments back into the closet, but should instead embrace the growing popular support for the freedom to marry.” Obama aides have previously sought to squash the perception that members of the administration are more supportive of the LGBT community than the president and have walked back the remarks of Michelle Obama and Melody Barnes .

The Human Rights Campaign’s incoming president Chad Griffin, however, noted that Biden’s remarks — and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s surprise embrace of same-sex marriage Monday morning — presented the administration with an opportunity. Griffin asked, “Is there even a question?” that Biden has evolved in his thinking, and added: “His words speak for themselves — and they send an incredibly important message outside Washington to the young LGBT teenager hearing the vice president of the United States talk about his belief in marriage equality and the fact that he or she can grow up and have the same dreams and aspirations as their friends, their colleagues, their parents.”

For a president seeking to reconnect with young people and reclaim the spark of 2008, this sounds like a message worth embracing.

Vice President Joe Biden has endorsed same-sex marriage, becoming the highest ranking American official to back marriage for gay and lesbian people. His comments signify a split within the Obama administration and may pave the way for President Obama — who says he supports civil unions and is still evolving on the matter — to also embrace equality.

Biden made his remarks during an appearance on Meet the Press, telling host David Gregory that he is “absolutely comfortable with…men marrying men, women marrying women.” He added, however, that “the President sets the policy” and did not say if he would support marriage in a second term. Biden credited the change-of-heart to the show Will & Grace, which aired on NBC from 1998 to 2006 and featured numerous gay characters:

GREGORY: Have your views evolved?

BIDEN: The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition. Who do you love? Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about. Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. [...]

GREGORY: You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?

BIDEN: Look, I am Vice President of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that. [...] I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far. People fear that is different and now they’re beginning to understand.

Watch it:

Biden has backed equal rights for the LGBT community throughout his career, but this is the first time he has publicly acknowledged his support of full marriage rights.

In December of 2010, Biden predicted, “I think the country’s evolving and I think there’s an inevitability for a national consensus on gay marriage.”

But when asked if he supports gay marriage during the 2008 Vice Presidential debate Biden was far more circumspect, saying, “No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that.” He even sought common ground with Sarah Palin on the issue and noted that both believe that “there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple.”

Since that performance, the administration has touted its accomplishments on behalf of the LGBT community — from the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to its refusal to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Yet Biden’s support for marriage could excite the LGBT community — many of whom have recently expressed outrage over Obama’s unwillingness to issue an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination in federal contracting — just ahead of the 2012 election.

Obama first told blogger Joe Sudbay that “attitudes evolve [on marriage equality] including mine” in October of 2010 and the administration last commented on his position during a press gaggle on March 30, 2012. “I don’t anticipate that the President would make news on [marriage equality],” Press Deputy Josh Earnest told a reporter en route to Burlington, Vermont when asked about Obama’s “evolving position.”

Gay and lesbian couples can wed in six states and the District of Columbia. Washington and Maryland both passed same-sex marriage laws in 2012, but they are currently being challenged by voter referenda.

Update

The campaign is trying to walk back Biden’s remarks:

Update

Will & Grace star Debra Messing praises Biden: