This past Friday, Mike Huckabee referenced Obama’s 2008 views on gay marriage when speaking to Laura Ingraham on “The O’Reilly Factor”:

The position that I hold is the position that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden held in 2008. Barack Obama held it until 2012. And my question that I would love to pose to the president is this: Mr. President, please explain that when you said in 2008 at the Saddleback Church forum that you stood for traditional marriage and you did so because you were a Christian and because it’s what the Bible taught, please answer: Were you lying then, are you lying now, or did the Bible get rewritten?

View the video below:

Huckabee’s not the only one referencing Obama’s stance in 2008. In the last few weeks, in the wake of Brendan Eich’s resignation as CEO of Mozilla, several pundits and bloggers have referenced Barack Obama’s views on same-sex marriage in 2008 when he was a candidate running for president. The unifying question was this: If Brendan Eich had to resign as CEO of Mozilla because he gave $1,000 to support Proposition 8 in 2008, why does Barack Obama get a pass for saying in 2008 that marriage should be between a man and a woman?

It echoes a similar question posed by Larry Elder of WND a few years ago, who asked why Rick Santorum was being scrutinized for his views on same-sex marriage, but Obama was getting a “pass” when, in Elder’s estimation, Obama had similar views as Santorum had.

DID Obama share the same viewpoint as Santorum, Eich or Huckabee? Well, how comparable Obama is to Eich, Huckabee or Santorum depends on how narrowly or broadly you define his views in 2008.

Indeed, in 2008, at Saddleback Church, Obama did say, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian… it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Click the YouTube video below to watch in full.

In that video, after saying that he believed that marriage is between a man and a woman, then-candidate Obama said he supports civil unions. He also said he does not believe in a constitutional amendment defining marriage. As recently as 2012, a month after Elder’s column comparing Obama to Santorum, Santorum voiced opposition to civil unions for same-sex couples while saying that he couples could work through the existing legal system to use contracts to get each of the rights associated with marriage.

Thus, to compare someone’s views on same-sex marriage to Barack Obama’s view in 2008 simply on the definition of marriage as a man and woman doesn’t tell the whole story on Obama or that other person’s viewpoints on civil unions. To only stop at the man-woman definition of marriage is too narrow and potentially misrepresents both Obama and the people to whom he’s being compared.

Specifically, if we’re comparing Obama and Brendan Eich. Eich was pressured to resign because he gave $1,000 to support Proposition 8. Obama, in 2008, did say, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.” But in 2008, Obama also said that Proposition 8 was “divisive and discriminatory.”

It’s unknown why Eich supported Prop 8, or what his personal views are. When the donation became public knowledge, he said he didn’t want to discuss Prop 8 on his blog or on Twitter. He said he wanted to focus on the company, not his personal beliefs.

[W]ithout getting into my personal beliefs, which I separate from my Mozilla work — when people learned of the donation, they felt pain. I saw that in friends’ eyes, [friends] who are LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered]. I saw that in 2012. I am sorry for causing that pain.

Hampton Catlin, a developer who couldn’t legally marry or start a business with his partner until the Supreme Court ruled last year that backers of Proposition 8 lacked standing, had blogged that he and his husband Michael would be pulling their product from the Mozilla Marketplace. Many came to see them as the figureheads of the boycott. After Eich’s resignation, Hampton Catlin wrote:

I met with Brendan and asked him to just apologize for the discrimination under the law that we faced. He can still keep his personal beliefs, but I wanted him to recognize that we faced real issues with immigration and say that he never intended to cause people problems.

It’s heartbreaking to us that he was unwilling to say even that.

We absolutely don’t believe that everyone who voted yes on Prop 8 is evil. In fact, we’re sure that most of them just didn’t understand the impact the law would have. That’s why so many people have changed their mind in 4 short years – because they saw the impact and pain that the law caused to friends and family members.

People think we were upset about his past vote. Instead we were more upset with his current and continued unwillingness to discuss the issue with empathy. Seriously, we assumed that he would reconsider his thoughts on the impact of the law (not his personal beliefs), issue an apology, and then he’d go on to be a great CEO.

The fact it ever went this far is really disturbing to us.

Many think that Eich got a raw deal and it was unfair that he was pressured to resigned. But has Obama gotten a clean pass on his statements?

If Obama or anyone who voiced opposition to same-sex marriage ever got a “pass,” it certainly wasn’t an across-the-board pass from the LGBTQ community. A quick Google search of the terms “Obama” “gay marriage” shows quickly that prominent sites and blogs about LGBTQ issues — The Advocate, The Bilerico Project, GoodAsYou and Towleroad — show that Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats did not get a “pass” on their stances on same-sex marriage or other issues. Bill Clinton, the president who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, didn’t receive a pass last year when he wrote an op-ed denouncing the law.

When former Florida governor Charlie Crist announced his support for same-sex marriage in an interview this past winter, he, too, compared his previous stance to that of Obama in 2008, but when comparing himself to Obama, he didn’t simply stop at the man-woman definition of marriage:

The President and I had the same view: we supported civil unions. I saw the interview he did with Robin Roberts last spring [in which he expressed support for same sex marriage]. I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s powerful, because you can tell he’s speaking from the heart.

I can’t speak for the President, but I suspect that to some degree, like me, he felt his support for civil unions was political. And so he’s finally saying, ‘Enough is enough. I’m over this. I’m not going to play the political angle anymore. I’m tired of it.’ Which is just the way I feel. You get to a point in your life where you say, ‘I’m just going to tell it.’ And here I am… I’m telling it. And I don’t care what anyone thinks.

Similarly, Richard Socarides, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, conceded in a New Yorker piece last year that Bill Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act was fueled by politics rather than personal views.

As the tide turns and public opinion changes, more and more famous politicians who opposed same-sex marriage will announce a public change in their stance on the issue. They might use the word “evolved,” like Obama did, or they will cite a family member is the reason for their change of heart, like Republican Rob Portman did in March 2013.

And as they voice their support for same-sex marriage, will their previous stances be compared to those of Barack Obama in 2008?