Blessed Are the Gay, For They Shall Be....Well, Gay

I've got to get out the old concordance to check on this story - Barack Obama has managed to justify gay marriage by finding it in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount:

With voting just hours away in "Super Tuesday II," some remarks by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama linking same-sex relationships to Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount are raising some eyebrows in the Christian community.

During a Sunday campaign stop in Nelsonville, Ohio, Pastor Leon Forte of Grace Christian Center in Athens, Ohio, asked the Illinois senator to address social concerns:

"Your campaign sets a quandary for most evangelical Christians. They believe in the social agenda that you have. They have a problem with what the conservatives have laid out as the moral litmus test about who is worthy and who is not."

As part of a lengthy videotaped response, Obama referred to the speech by Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew, as well as some anti-homosexual statements made by the apostle Paul which he called "obscure":

"I will tell you that I don't believe in gay marriage, but I do think that people who are gay and lesbian should be treated with dignity and respect and that the state should not discriminate against them. So, I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don't think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans. That's my view. But we can have a respectful disagreement on that."

Are gays the "poor in spirit", or the "meek" that "shall inherit the earth"? Got me.