Reacting to the High Court’s 4-3 decision, a Democratic strategist quipped, “I wonder if they’re taking money from the Republican National Committee. The timing is devastating. It’s really going to hurt.”
With Massachusetts Senator John Kerry seemingly poised to become the Democratic nominee, the ruling is a gift for the White House. The Bush campaign can use Massachusetts as shorthand for everything that is un-American. The Democrats are making it even easier by holding their convention in Boston.
Getting people worked up over gay marriage distracts from a war that isn’t going well in Iraq and an economy that isn’t producing jobs. Coming just three days after Janet Jackson’s much ballyhooed “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime entertainment, the judges’ decision plays into the country’s cultural war and energizes evangelical Christians and Catholic traditionalists, the foot soldiers of the GOP.
The 2004 election is shaping up to be a contest of intensity–which side can get more of its hard-core supporters to the polls. The first President Bush lost his bid for reelection because he didn’t tend sufficiently to the party’s base, and social conservatives failed to turn out in the numbers he needed. The nightmare issue for Karl Rove is that the Democrats are far more energized than the Republicans. The turnout was substantially up in their recent primaries and caucuses. Here are some numbers: Delaware up 195 percent; New Hampshire up 42 percent; Oklahoma up 124 percent; Missouri up 58 percent; Arizona up 215 percent. The motivating factor for these voters is “ABB”– anybody but Bush–which means they’ll be there in November.
At the same time, conservatives have been losing faith in George W. Bush. The rising budget deficit, an immigration reform plan that they see as rewarding law-breakers, more federal money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a prescription drug plan that will cost a third more than Bush promised top their list of grievances. But introduce the specter of gay marriage and all is forgiven. These same voters who might have sat out the election will be there for Bush.
A White House statement called the gay marriage decision “deeply troubling.” Sixteen states already are moving toward banning gay marriages and a constitutional amendment is being drafted in Congress. Even many progressives say this is not an issue for which they would go to the ramparts. “It’s like fiftieth on my list of priorities,” says a Democratic activist, who predicts that once Kerry secures the nomination, assuming he does, he’ll have to do a “Sister Souljah” appearance in front of a gay group. Sister Souljah was a relatively unknown blues singer whom Bill Clinton rebuked for her racist, anti-white lyrics at an event organized by Jesse Jackson during the 1992 campaign. Caught off guard and offended by Clinton’s lecture, Jackson distanced himself from the candidate–exactly the result Clinton needed to legitimize himself as a centrist who wasn’t beholden to the party’s liberal interest groups.
Kerry is insulated from some of the GOP’s blunter attacks on him as a liberal elitist because of his military service, but he can’t just let the gay marriage issue fester. He was one of only 14 senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which denies gay marriages federal recognition and allows states to disregard gay marriages performed in states where they are legal. President Clinton signed the bill under duress knowing his reelection was at stake, and that a presidential veto would kick off a campaign season of gay-bashing.
The Massachusetts split decision ruled that civil unions consign same-sex couples to second-class status, and that marriage is the only way to go. But there is a danger of the courts leading society in a direction it is not ready to go. Gay rights is a civil rights issue, but there is a difference between sexual orientation and race. Affirmative action laws apply to African-Americans; they don’t apply to gays and lesbians. Maybe someday society will come to an expanded view of gender and gay marriage will be affirmed, but that evolution should emerge from society, not from the courts.
When Howard Dean said he wanted the votes of Southern whites with confederate flag decals on their pickup trucks, his words troubled African-Americans who view the confederate flag as a racist symbol. Dean sought to assure African-Americans about his commitment to civil rights by pointing to Vermont’s civil unions bill, which he signed. It didn’t work. Blacks don’t equate the two, and black voters in South Carolina, where Dean made the comparison, don’t have liberal views on the issue of gay rights.
Ultimately high-voltage social issues like gay marriage matter less than the economy and the situation in Iraq. It’s noise, but if the noise is loud enough, what we like to call the “real issues” get muted. The Democrats accuse Bush of being out of touch but on this one, the administration is on the side of the majority.
