First, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage will never get through Congress. Even if it does, it will die in the states. There aren’t 38 legislatures ready to turn back the clock on the evolving gay-rights movement. Coming out in favor of the amendment is Bush’s way of reassuring evangelicals he’s one of them. Think of it as the political equivalent of Mel Gibson’s passion play. It rouses the true believers.
Second, what Bush did is all about base-tending, and the fact that he had to do it this deep into the election cycle reveals a weakness. This is the time when Bush should be reaching for the political center. Instead, from his perspective, he had no choice but to bow to the fire-breathing evangelicals. Without their enthusiastic support in November, he would suffer the same fate as his father–one term and out.
Finally, supporting an amendment to the Constitution to exclude a whole group of people from the rights and benefits of marriage is overreaching on a scale that Bush could regret. He dithered about it for weeks, hoping to avoid taking a definitive position. Polls show that a majority of the country opposes gay marriage, but a majority of voters also opposes amending the Constitution. A parade of influential social conservatives warned the White House that Bush couldn’t stay on the sidelines. “It reminds me of his father’s reelection campaign, when the senior Bush didn’t have a strong hold on the conservative base and had to take positions he was uncomfortable with, culminating in the [1992] Houston convention,” recalls an aide to a senior Senate Republican. “If you’re a Republican, the fact he had to do it is discouraging.”
The Republican convention in ‘92 was anti-gay, anti-black and anti-working woman, an orgy of intolerance that left the senior Bush behind in the polls and appearing out of touch with the country’s real problems, namely the economy, stupid. Conservative commentator and failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan invoked the specter of a cultural war with gangs of marauding minorities taking over American cities while Marilyn Quayle, wife of the vice president, delivered a hard-edged homily about a woman’s place in society. Bush’s first campaign stop after that convention was at a religious-right gathering in Texas.
At this stage of the campaign, the younger Bush anticipated running on the war and tax cuts, not on a constitutional amendment that divides Republicans. Problems with the base forced Bush’s hand. His immigration reform plan sparked a revolt among conservatives, and talk radio fanned the flames. The administration’s cavalier attitude about deficit spending infuriated the right–along with a Medicare prescription-drug bill that is the biggest expansion of the welfare state in 40 years. When Bush seemed to dodge the issue of gay marriage, the right got apoplectic.
The risk for Bush is that openly pandering to religious conservatives will energize the Democratic base more than the Republican base. A willingness to amend the Constitution to enshrine an ideological position is proof positive for Democrats and potentially independent and swing voters that Bush is no compassionate conservative.
Hearings will get underway next week in the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but don’t be fooled into thinking lawmakers will act quickly. There is no appetite in the Senate to go forward. The complexity of the issue is embodied in the Cheney family, where daughter Mary is openly gay and her father, the vice president, is on the record stating that the legality of same-sex relationships should be left to the states. The likely Democratic nominee, John Kerry, is fond of saying that he shares Vice President Cheney’s position.
Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who once compared homosexuality to bestiality, is the right’s point man on the amendment. He wants a vote before the summer recess. Republicans don’t think they can muster the supermajority of 67 senators and 290 representatives, but they think it is smart politics to put Democrats on the record. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is more cautious on the timetable. He doesn’t like to lose. Besides, a gay-marriage ban is more of a winner as an issue than as a vote.
Republicans think Kerry is vulnerable on the issue. He was one of only 14 senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act that President Bill Clinton signed, defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Now Kerry says he opposes gay marriage. A Republican strategist envisions an ad that shows a cartoonish Kerry somersaulting across the screen to symbolize his flip-flops on key issues.
Changing his position according to the political winds is Kerry’s chief weakness. He voted for the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind education reform bill and NAFTA, the trade agreement with Mexico. As a candidate, he has adopted some radically different poses. But on gay marriage, it is Bush who is now vulnerable. Civil disobedience is the American way. It is how women gained the vote in this country–by picketing the White House and getting hauled off in paddy wagons. It’s how the civil-rights movement made advances in the 1960s and how antiwar protesters forced the government to acknowledge failure in Vietnam.
This is the first time a proposed constitutional amendment seeks to exclude a group of people from the rights and benefits of a societal arrangement called marriage. It puts Bush on the side of intolerance–a dangerous place to be for a man who doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of his father.
