Fridae

In an interview on "Larry King Live" on CNN Tuesday night, the former First Lady Laura Bush Bush said she disagrees with her husband, George Bush, on two key issues that continually popped up during his eight years in office and on which her husband had taken damaging stands.

During the interview in which was was talking about her new book Spoken From the Heart, King asked the former First Lady Laura Bush about her views on gay marriage and abortion.

"I think there are a lot of people who have trouble coming to terms with that because they see marriage as traditionally 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, I think, the same sort of rights that everyone has."

While she admitted that her husband has a differing view on same-sex marriage, she's confident that her way of thinking will prevail. "It's a real reversal ... to accept gay marriage," she said. "But I think we could, yeah. I think it's also a generational thing ... that will come, I think."

As for abortion, Bush told King: "I think that it's important that it remain legal. I think it's important for people, medical reasons and for other reasons."

Laura Bush: "I think that there are a lot of people who have trouble coming to terms with that because they see marriage traditionally as between a man and a woman — but also know that, when couples are committed to each other and love each other they ought to have, I think, the same sort of rights that everyone has."

Larry King: "So would that be an area where you disagree?"

Laura Bush: "I guess that would be an area where we disagree. I understand totally what George thinks about marriage being between a man and a woman, and it’s a real, um, really, reversal of that to accept gay marriage."

Larry King: "But you do?”

Laura Bush: "But I think we could, yeah. I think it's a generational thing that will slowly..."

Larry King: "But it's coming?"

Laura Bush: "But it will come."

Salon's Rebecca Traister in Laura Bush: More interesting than her husband:

In ways that we rarely consider, Laura Bush filled out her role in a post-Hillary, pre-Michelle Obama timeline. She was the second first lady in history (though the second of three in a row) to hold a post-graduate degree, hers in library science. Single until the age of 30, Laura Welch went to college and graduate school and worked as a schoolteacher before she met and married George W. Bush, the black-sheep scion of the Texas Bush clan.

And while her marital decision is all most people need to know about Laura Bush, there were always vague suspicions -- fueled by rumors that she smoked cigarettes on the sly, disagreed with her husband on policy and that she hated their eight-year stint in the White House, as well as by the obvious disparity between her husband's reputation as a nincompoop and her reputation as a literature-loving intellectual (at least by contemporary White House standards) -- that Laura Bush led the complicated life of someone who knew better than the person who was her more powerful partner.

...

For those of us who cannot imagine differing with our life partners on issues so morally and emotionally crucial, Laura Bush's willingness to remain tethered to her husband is a puzzle. But watching her speak to King, I could not help remembering words that Curtis Sittenfeld put in the mouth of Laura's fictional doppelgänger, just after the heroine has revealed that she did not vote for her husband for president: "All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power."