Were Friends part of Obama’s Evolution?

Posted on by

Pres­i­dent Obama’s been attribut­ing some of his so-called “evo­lu­tion” on same-sex mar­riage to his daugh­ters. As he told ABC’s Robin Roberts:

You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose par­ents are same-sex cou­ples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sit­ting around the din­ner table, and we’re talk­ing about their friends and their par­ents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that some­how their friends’ par­ents would be treated dif­fer­ently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

So where do Obama’s daughter’s inde­pen­dent friends come from? Like most tweens the like­li­est answer is school–in their case, Sid­well Friends. It’s not unlikely that the “evo­lu­tion” owed some­thing to the Quaker envi­ron­ment there.

Most elite Quaker schools have only a token base of Quaker stu­dents and teach­ers, so we can’t assume that Malia and Sasha’s friends are Friends. Like many outward-facing Quaker insti­tu­tions, mod­ern Friends schools’ strongest claim to Quak­erism is the val­ues and dis­cern­ment tech­niques they share with the wider world. They con­sciously trans­mit a style and ped­a­gogy and cre­ate an envi­ron­ment of open­ness and diver­sity. Of course the Obama kids are going to rub up against non-traditional mar­riages at a East Coast Quaker school. And no one should be sur­prised if they bring a lit­tle of that back home when the school bus drops them off at 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue.

NYTimes: Obama Girls Influ­ence the Pres­i­dent — Again
Pres­i­dent Obama often uses his daugh­ters, Malia and Sasha, as object lessons in explain­ing his rea­son­ing behind impor­tant pol­icy positions.