President Joe Biden's campaign took issue with The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles' comments on marriage during his Thursday CPAC 2024 speech.
Knowles' speech discussed traditional marriage and criticized efforts to redefine the institution.
“They can’t really turn a couple of men or a couple of women, or three men and a billy goat for that matter, into a marriage,” Knowles said. “That’s just not what marriage is. No disrespect is intended to anyone. Some people don’t want to get married — okay, there’s no obligation, but marriage has a meaning.”
The Daily Wire host asserted: “Marriage is and always has been the union of a man and a woman, ordered toward the procreation and education of children.”
"If you don’t like that, don’t blame me. I didn’t set the rules," he continued. "It wasn’t the mean old conservatives who did this; we did not invent marriage. Marriage is a natural institution.”
Knowles said observation of traditional marriage would be used as "slander" and derided as "hateful."
Biden's campaign shared a clip of Knowles' speech to their X account and suggested former President Donald Trump and other MAGA supporters would attack "marriage equality" as part of their 2025 plan.
"Top Trump advocate at CPAC echos MAGA’s Project 2025 plan to go after marriage equality during a second Trump term: Marriage is a man and a woman," the account wrote.
In response to the campaign's post, Knowles shared a clip from Biden's 2006 appearance on NBC's Meet The Press insisting "marriage is between a man and a woman, and states must respect that."
"I'm just paraphrasing you, Mr. President!" Knowles wrote.
Other prominent progressive Democrats similarly threw criticism towards Knowles remarks, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
"The GOP are telling us who they are. We should listen," he wrote.
"The GOP is telling you that we believe what the Democrats and everyone else for all of history believed until ~2015. You should, in fact, listen!" Knowles quipped at Newsom.
In 2008, while he was then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's running mate, Biden said he and Obama were not in support of "redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage."
While running for re-election in 2012, Biden indicated he was in fact support of same-sex marriage saying the argument was a "simple proposition" of "Who do you love, and will you be loyal with that person you love?"
"That's what people are finding out is what all marriages, at their root, are about whether they're marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals," he said during another appearance on Meet the Press. "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, and women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties."
Biden insisted he didn't see "much of a distinction beyond that."
