Oh No! It's Teh Gay!
Less than two weeks to go before elections. People are dying in Iraq. People are dying in Afghanistan. GDP data was significantly softer than anticipated. So, what should the President talk about?
The "threat" to marriage, of course! What threat is this? Apparently that posed by yesterday's ruling of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
"Yesterday in New Jersey, we had another activist court issue a ruling that raises doubts about the institution of marriage," Mr. Bush said at a luncheon at the Iowa State Fairgrounds that raised $400,000 for Mr. Lamberti.
Interestingly, the New Jersey Supreme Court did not decide on the issue of marriage at all, leaving that to the legislature. It simply decided that the state could not offer benefits to married couples that were not also offered to domestic partnered couples. New Jersey has a law that makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, so you might think the courts were not being particularly activist here, that they were just applying that law. But why let a little thing like that get in the way of good old-fashioned GOP homophobic fear-mongering?
The president drew applause when he reiterated his long-held stance that marriage was "a union between a man and a woman," adding, "I believe it's a sacred institution that is critical to the health of our society and the well-being of families, and it must be defended."
In reading that quote, my first question is "Defended from whom?" Where is this grave threat to heterosexual marriage? From gays and lesbians who want to have legally recognized unions? I may be naive, but I always thought that a marriage was based on the love and commitment of the couple. Not on other people, at least not other unrelated people. So if two women want to cement their love and commitment through a legal ceremony, this somehow threatens the love and commitment of heterosexual spouses? If people really do believe that, and it's fairly obvious that they do, how is this not based on fear of gays and lesbians? It's pretty clear that the real threat to heterosexual marriages are posed by the people in those marriages. Marriages don't break up because other people get married. They break up because one spouse cheated on the other. One spouse lied to the other. One spouse... Oh, you get the point.
However, while there are people that believe that same-sex marriage will threaten heterosexual marriage, I don't believe for three seconds that any of them are George W. Bush. If he did, he wouldn't raise this issue only right before elections. He's pandering to the fears of his base, and that kind of cynicism, IMO, is worse than the fears of his base. You might eventually convince someone who is afraid that there's no reason to be so. It's hard to convince a cynical manipulator not to seek to increase his/her own power. If they actually gave a damn about other people, they wouldn't manipulate them so blatantly in the first place.