Political Expediency

I was really hoping that the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans weren't actually going to go through with the anti-gay-marriage push that every news outlet has been predicting. I don't know why I was hoping that, since it makes a lot of sense for them and the politics of energizing the base, though roundly battered in the press, are still enshrined in Republican strategic doctrine.

Shockingly enough, my hopes were not fulfilled. Starting Monday, the administration is launching a push for an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the Constitution, and Bush hopes to spark a national debate on the subject. (He used his weekly radio address to discuss his plans.) It's blatant, it's ridiculously partisan, and to claim that it isn't motivated by the basest- no pun intended- political intentions is totally disingenous, especially since it's destined to fail.

It also tells us that Karl Rove is still running the show from behind the scenes.

An anonymous Republican said that Karl Rove was not particularly excited about where he had been sent during the White House "shake-up" of a few months ago. But I mentioned then, in a post on the subject, that Rove wasn't going too far away. He'd just become too much of a liability to parade around in front of the cameras all the time, and would be hanging around behind the scenes to pull strings.

This bears the hallmark of classic Rove. We're losing thousands of American lives and billions of your tax dollars in Iraq. There is a crisis of ethics in Congress right now. The administration's neglect allowed an American city to drown. And now, Bush wants to focus the national debate on a subject designed to promote intolerance and division just to mitigate the damage during an election year.

True conservatives- the kind who have all but disappeared these days- would be outraged at the concept of Big Government trying to step in and tell women what not to do with their bodies and decide which couples can get married. And a few of them are. The Cato Institute, for example, is a conservative think tank that's come out against this amendment because it runs entirely contrary to American values (and their own values of limited government.)

I would like to think that the elements within the American right who still believe in limited government would unite with those of us on the left who believe that gay people deserve to be treated like, well...people. However, I hope this whole thing just quietly dies. Dick Cheney used to be great at this- since he has a lesbian daughter, Congressman Cheney was always able to quietly kill anti-gay legislation without making the headlines. Despite his enormous power, that ain't gonna fly now.

The best thing would be for this amendment to avoid the kind of lengthy "national debate" that Bush wants. It's obviously going to fail, because lawmakers in Congress are not insane. But giving religious conservatives prime-time opportunities to whip up the fervor of their voters is going to do bad things in the fall for Democrats.

Therefore, to paraphrase the President's thoughts on confirming justices, I urge a swift, up-or-down vote upon this important national issue. That way, we can defeat it and get to work on the real problems affecting America. Like that war, that just doesn't seem to play nice and go away.