Laura Bush Supports Gay Marriage and Abortion

Former first lady Laura Bush secretly supported abortion rights and gay marriage during her husband's presidency.

Mrs. Bush's kept her views to herself during her husband's eight years in the White House.

But she has now stunned her husband's right-wing evangelical Christian supporters with her shock admission in a television interview, in which she said she did not agree with George W Bush on two of the most controversial topics in America.

Although the couple disagreed in private, she insisted they were not ‘argumentative’.

And she claimed it wasn't that she was covering up her views while her husband was in office - it was just that people rarely asked her.

'I understand his viewpoint and he understands mine,' she told CNN.

'I think we ought to look at gay marriage and debate it. A lot of people have trouble coming to terms with it, because they see marriage traditionally as [between] a man and a woman.

'But I also know that, when couples are committed to each other and love each other, they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has.'

Mrs. Bush said she believed the US could accept gay marriage one day, adding that it was 'a generational thing'.

Mrs. Bush was put on the spot when she was asked during the interview what she thought of the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, and her husband's view that it should be overturned.

She said: 'I think it's important that it remains legal because I think it's important for people, for medical reasons and other reasons.'

Mrs. Bush is in the midst of a promotional tour for her book, Spoken From The Heart.

In the memoir, she writes that she asked Mr. Bush to refrain from making gay marriage a key issue in his 2004 presidential campaign.

'We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay,' she wrote. 'But, at that moment, I could never have imagined what path this issue would take and where it would lead.'

Soon after winning the presidency a second time, largely through the support of evangelical voters, Mr. Bush went on to make a speech calling for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being only between a man and a woman.

'The union of a man and a woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith,' he said.

Leading US gay rights campaigner Michael Cole, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, said Mrs. Bush's support would have been welcomed 'when the right-wing was using same-sex couples as election year pawns'.

But he added in an interview: 'Her speaking out now for marriage equality shows that more and more Americans realize all families need the same rights and protections.'