Normally, I don’t like to multi-post on the same story on the same day unless there is breaking news but this story seems worth an exception. Early this morning, I posted a story stating that GOP Gov Candidate Larry Hogan had changed his position on marriage equality after the primary. It turns out that was incorrect: he opposed trying to overturn the will of the people.

However, there is really more to the story than that simple narrative that the Hogan campaign would like to propagate. Hogan has no clear public position on the core issue. In response to the Baltimore Sun, he refused to state whether he personally supports marriage equality legislation, sidestepping the question by neatly saying that the referendum decided the matter. Elsewhere, he has stated that he “was” a supporter of “traditional marriage” and supported civil unions for same-sex couples but also would not state how he voted in the referendum.

Politically sensible as I outlined earlier but not exactly a profile in courage–and there were Republicans willing to take a stand in favor of marriage equality in the legislature.

And it also obfuscates the well-known truth in the halls of Annapolis that many Republican legislators don’t give a whit whether same-sex couples can marry and that many who voted against it actually personally favored the legislation (and knew marriage equality was an inevitability) but feared their primary election constituency.

Though I welcome Hogan’s desire to place his focus elsewhere, the dissimulation by Republicans like Hogan who seek to be viable statewide on their personal beliefs is a bit wearying–and must be even more so for him as he will have to continue to adjust his position with rapidly changing public opinion. It also seems fair to ask how someone who refuses to say how he voted on a key issue is going to lead the State on others in the future.