Rick Perry

The anti-gay National Organization for Marriage announced Friday, August 26, that Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has signed its pledge to vigorously oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Perry joins with Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum in supporting the pledge, promising to support a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as “one man and one woman.” In signing the pledge, the candidates also promise to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court and appoint judicial officials who will “respect the original meaning of the Constitution.” And they promise to create a presidential commission to investigate the “harassment of traditional marriage supporters” and “advance legislation” to allow voters in Washington, D.C., to consider an initiative to repeal the city’s marriage equality law.

The Chicago Sun-Times editorialized Saturday that Perry’s signing of the pledge puts him squarely on the side of opposing same-sex marriage—versus trying to leave some wiggle room for state’s to exercise their own prerogatives on the matter.

“Perry is to be commended for clarifying his position on this matter,” wrote the Sun-Times, “because he’d previously tried to have it both ways: finessing his conservative personal views with a state’s rights argument that might have given some people the mistaken impression he was open-minded on the subject.

The National Organization for Marriage, which has spent millions of dollars to support bans on marriage equality for same-sex couples, said that Perry’s signing of the pledge “makes crystal clear that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, gay marriage is going to be a bigger issue in 2012 than it was in 2008, because the difference between the GOP nominee and Pres. Obama is going to be large and clear.”

Perry’s views on marriage equality and LGBT people are coming under constant scrutiny in the mainstream media now.

Time magazine reporter Mark Benjamin published a brief column August 24 noting that, in his 2008 book On My Honor, Perry compared homosexuality to alcoholism this way: “Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink,” he wrote. “And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.” Perry suggests gays exercise abstinence.

Perry and other Republican presidential candidates will participate Wednesday, September 7, in a debate sponsored by the Reagan Presidential Library in California. This will be Perry’s first debate as part of the Republican field. The debate will be co-hosted and moderated by NBC News and Politico.com. Republicans will then meet again in debate Monday, September 12. The latter debate is sponsored by CNN and the Tampa TEA Party Express in Florida.

The Gallup Poll on August 24 reported Perry is the current frontrunner in the Republican field. He earned support from 29 percent of 1,040 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed by phone (60 percent by landline, 40 percent by cell) August 17-21. Romney came in second with 17 percent, followed by Ron Paul with 13 percent, and Michele Bachmann with 10 percent. Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich each garnered four percent of the support, Rick Santorum received three, and Jon Huntsman one percent. “Other” candidates—who were not identified—received two percent. And 17 percent of respondents expressed no preferred candidate.