Slouching Donkey, Lying Elephant

Voting One's Conscience

If Tuesday I woke up with a grin at Bush's ill-conceived announcement, today I wanted to weep upon sitting down to read my daily blogs. It seems that John Kerry has indicated his support for an amendment to the Massachusetts state constitution banning gay marriage.

Now, at first I misread some of the commentary in the blogosphere--as did some of the people I read, because my first impression was that Kerry had indicated he'd support a version of /Bush's/ amendment authored in Massachusetts. A bit more digging and a phone call to the Kerry campaign later, and I'm corrected and a little mollified--but not much.

As near as I can divine it, Kerry's stance seems to be that he agrees with Bush completely--he believes that marriage is for a man and a woman, and that there ought to be an allowance for civil unions--he just doesn't think there should be an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and that the states should decide.

I didn't like Kerry very much before. After Lieberman dropped out, I considered him the worst of the "serious" candidates, and now that it's down to him and Edwards, I'm resigned to pulling the lever for him without much enthusiasm just to get Bush out of office, since an Edwards surge seems unlikely. And anyone who knows me, knows that I'm committed to Anyone But Bush in November. But Kerry's spineless, discriminatory stance on this--ideologically indistinguishable from Bush's--has caused some serious soul-searching this morning. Forget support--Kerry doesn't have my support and never did. Let's talk about my vote. Can I vote for Kerry this fall, even if I /know/ that any other vote or abstinence thereof is effectively a vote for Bush?

I just don't know. This issue is too critical to waffle on--this is this generation's civil rights war.

What I do know, now, is how the Nader voters felt in 2000.

The Shot Heard 'Round the World

And just like that, Bush has declared war on the gay community.

It's not as if there had been any doubt about his intentions, or those of the extremist right. But until now Bush had stopped short of calling outright for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage--recognizing, correctly, that this was an extreme position on the losing side of the issue.

Some reacted with anger and dismay to this. I'm not surprised. I'm peripherally involved with the GLBT community myself, and it would've been very easy to slip into the kind of lather Bush's blunders usually provoke in me. But when I saw the headline this morning, a slow grin began dawning on my face.

Bush just ensured that he will not be re-elected this year.

Billmon has a very good post up about it this morning, and while I'm in agreement with him on many things--among those, that we need to stand side-by-side with people like Andrew Sullivan, conservatives who have been shocked out of their support for Bush by this rallying cry to the extremist right--I disagree with him on one thing:

How was this not a war cry? An amendment to the Constitution to ban gay marriage for all time? Bush's used qualifying language that are at odds with his stated positions. He's mentioned in the past that he's in favor of the Musgrave amendment. Bill of all people should recognize by now that any moderation in Bush's speeches exist only to distract and mislead. Like the statements he made about diplomatic efforts in the run-up to the Iraq War, they are nothing more than noise.

To Christians, conservatives, gay Republicans, and anyone out there with the decency and honesty to take a good hard look at Bush--this is the time to do so. Bush has just aligned the Republican party squarely with the most extreme elements of the religious right. He has drawn a line in the sand and declared that gay and lesbian couples are second-class citizens, and that heterosexuality must be enshrined in the Constitution.

If you aren't outright opposed to gay marriage, ask yourself whether you can continue to support Bush, or whether this is the last straw. If you are, ask yourself whether granting the civil and legal incidents of marriage to gays is an issue so critical to our nation that it requires a Constitutional amendment. And if you're in favor of it and can't be swayed otherwise, take a good hard look at how divisive this issue is, and ask yourself whether you really think it's wise to press for an amendment to the United States Constitution.

Because by all means, bring it on. It will guarantee that moderates and independents will drop Bush like a hot potato, and that this country will be spared the damage of another four years of Bush.

Edit: Calpundit asks an important question:

This is not a winning strategy. To the extent that it is strategy at all, it smacks of desperation. Bush's base of far right religious conservatives have been threating to stay home on election day if he doesn't come out with stronger language and action on this issue, and he's essentially been forced to choose between alienating that constituency, and alienating independents and Republican moderates. It's a Hobson's choice, and I wish I could say I have any sympathy for him--but I don't. It's forced him to abandon his veneer of "compassionate conservatism" and go on record in favor of bigotry anathema to everything this country stands for.

Edit: Josh Marshall shares my opinion that Bush has been backed into a corner by the extremist right.

Pulling the lever for Bush

Kevin Drum opines about the increasing hemmorhage of conservative voters away from Bush. This is an unsurprising trend--I've written about Bush's declining approval ratings before, and recent polling patterns do seem to support my contention that the more Americans see of Bush's day-to-day governing, the less they like him--and that it takes exceptional events, like 9/11 or Saddam's capture, to give him a temporary bump in the polls. I think we have yet to see what Bush's baseline support is, and I'm betting it's in the 40s at best.

Bush's re-election numbers are in free-fall. The more informed Americans get about Bush, the less inclined they are to give him another four years. As far as I can tell, the people who still support Bush for re-election tend to fall into three categories:

1) Those who are informed and realize, on some level, that the Bush administration is too incompetent to run this country and is enacting policies that are detrimental to it in the long term, but are either too dishonest or too selfish to kick "their" party out of office. The best we can hope for from these people is that they'll be so disgusted with Bush's betrayals on issues important to them that they'll stay home on election day--but most of them will probably pull the lever just to keep a Republican in office.

2) Those who are simply uninformed--whether from stupidity, lack of opportunity, willful ignorance, or because they reject sources of input that challenge their beliefs. These people are sometimes reachable--but it's going to take the right blunder by Bush, or combination thereof, to do it. He keeps piling them on, so there's hope yet.

3) Those who think the so-called "War on Terror" trumps all other issues, and that Bush is the best man to prosecute this struggle. Some of them are of the xenophobic, France-bashing, hawkish bent, and these are simply not worth spending your time on. They cannot be reached, because all of Bush's "diplomatic" traits which we see as catastrophic, they see as laudable. Some of them, like Michael Totten, are latter-day converts to hawkish foreign policy, and /can/ be swayed--if they can be convincingly shown that a Democrat can protect America better than Bush.

A Question of Equality

First of all, my apologies to those of my readers--all five of you--who've been wondering where I've been. It's not that there hasn't been anything newsworthy to blog, it's that I've been caught up in the hubbub of a cross-country move and job hunt.

I need to break my silence, though, and I've been itching to comment on the gay marriage issue that was so recently pushed to the forefront of national news. Time Magazine has an article profiling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his recent decision to open marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and I think the headline of the article--I Do ... No, You Don't!--is a uniquely insightful comment on the motivations of those opposed to gay marriage.

Many in the blogosphere have already weighed in on this matter. Josh Marshall has a very honest bit of soul-searching that is well worth a read, particularly for those who are on the fence with this issue. Andrew Sullivan, of course, has been all over this, and while his legendary disingenuousness requires one to take what he writes with a salt shaker, he's close enough to this issue personally that he's hitting many of the right notes. Calpundit has a pretty good roundup of links. And Glenn Reynolds, to whom I'm averse to linking, isn't the first or the last person to compare Newsom's actions to that of Judge Roy Moore--you know, the Alabama judge who put Ten Commandments monument in his courthouse and defied a court order to remove it.

A few thoughts spring to mind, here.

• First of all, I have to be completely honest and say that from a legal standpoint, I put Newsom and Moore in the same category. Fundamentally, they are both doing the same thing: defying, in their capacity as public officials, a law that they feel is unjust. Both of them believe that their defiance is justified under the Constitution--in Moore's case, he seemed to feel that the First Amendment /protected/ his right to religious expression, while in Newsom's, he feels that the equal protection clause in the California State Constitution trumps the initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the state.

  There are differences, of course--but ultimately, the difference for me is that I think that Newsom's cause is just and correct, and that Moore's is not. I believe that Newsom is fighting for equality, whereas Moore was trying to insert his religion into a place it has no business being.

• If you want a reliable buzzword or phrase to use as a channel marker for gauging how uninformed or prejudiced someone is, watch for use of the word "sacred"--usually combined with "institution"--in an argument against gay marriage. The debate about gay marriage isn't about whether churches should be allowed to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies--they already can choose to do so or not. The debate is about whether the State, as a secular institution, should confer the legal status and incidences of marriage upon same-sex couples. This is distinct and separate from the religious ceremony of marriage.

  The word "sacred" has no place in this equation. When someone starts talking about the "sanctity of marriage", they have left the realms of law and logic and revealed that their argument rests on the shaky foundation of religious bigotry.

• Equally specious is the argument that marriage should only be between a man and a woman because that is how it has always been. If you're familiar with fallacies, it's called an Appeal to Tradition. Slavery was a tradition in most of the world for thousands of years, but for the last few hundred years we've been evolving beyond that. Just because a thing has always been so, or is currently believed to be so, does not make it right. Moreover, those who assert that our contemporary model of marriage is the only natural one are ignorant of history--polygamy and group marriages, for example, aren't solely the province of the Mormons church.
• As seems to be happening in so many other ways recently, the worm has turned. Gay marriage is inevitable. Conservative pundits, religious bigots and Joe Six-Pack will rant and rail, but to no avail. Now that the issue has been correctly framed as one of equality and basic human decency, Bush and others who publicly oppose gay marriage will be unable to mount an opposition without revealing their prejudices for what they are.

More to come, I'm sure. But that'll do for now.