From Gabriel Rotello over at the Huffington Post:

Ah ha, I knew it! Barack Obama supports same-sex marriage after all. (Or at least he did before he set his sights on national office.)

That’s the eye popping news this week from a gay newspaper in Chicago.

The Windy City Times dug through its archives and discovered two candidate surveys conducted in 1996, when Obama was running for the Illinois state senate.

In the first, Obama responded to a question by writing “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

In the second, Obama was asked if he supported a document called The Marriage Resolution, which states “RESOLVED, the state should not interfere with same-gender couples who choose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities and commitment of civil marriage.”

Obama wrote his response by hand: “I would support such a resolution.”