WASHINGTON – It might as well have been a lifetime ago, but it’s been less than 10 years since conservative activists mounted a crusade against gay marriage, using it as a wedge to propel tradition-minded voters to the polls. It was a cynical ploy by Republican strategists looking for a way to ensure a winning margin for George W. Bush, who needed the activism of conservative Christians.
Right-wing preachers, such as Atlanta’s now-disgraced Eddie Long, held protest marches to condemn homosexuality as an “abomination.” (Long has since been exposed as a hypocrite who likely exploited young men for sex.) Long and other gay-bashers declared that gay unions would lead to the death of traditional marriage, the utter collapse of moral values, the end of the republic.
In that highly charged climate, voters in several states added prohibitions against gay marriage to their state constitutions. The same year, 2004, the U.S. Senate debated, and rejected, a similar amendment to the nation’s founding document.
That was then. Even though most of the GOP presidential candidates are sticking with the party’s traditional stance against same-sex unions, it’s unlikely that the issue will move many voters next year.
It’s surprising – pleasantly so – just how quickly things have changed. Last year, most polls showed Americans were still not ready to endorse same-sex marriage. But recent polls show a newfound majority in support of gay unions, with most movement among Democrats and independents. With last month’s vote in the New York state legislature, six states and the District of Columbia allow such marriages.
Perhaps Americans just needed the Great Recession to remind them that the siren call of wedge issues is a distraction from the important work of governments: protecting the home front, guaranteeing justice, providing equal opportunity, feeding and nurturing broad economic growth. No one who has lost a job or a house to foreclosure worries much about whether the gay couple down the street can get married.
Economists now tell us that the “oughts,” the period roughly coinciding with Bush’s presidency, were a lost decade, a period of zero net jobs growth. Despite huge tax cuts that went largely to the wealthy, the economy sputtered, barely registering a pulse. The long, slow decline of the nation’s middle class suddenly gained speed.
Had we not wasted so much precious time and expended so much political capital on narrow-minded gay-bashing, might we have found a way to generate some well-paying jobs? Might we have built some bridges and train tracks and sent more promising students to college? Might we have been preparing for a global economy that demands different skills?
Maybe it took stunning economic setbacks for us to realize that gays and lesbians are not an exotic breed trying to foist an outrageous “lifestyle” on prim and proper heteros. They are our friends and church members, nephews and nieces, trying to claim the same rights that accrue to all Americans.
Gay and lesbian couples struggle to keep their jobs, pay their mortgages, save for their retirements. They worry about what the future will look like for their children. How exotic is that?
Though President Barack Obama has boosted gay rights significantly while in office, he has refused to endorse the concept of same-sex marriage – a posture that has infuriated some gay activists. Surely the president, a constitutional lawyer, knows that marriage is both a religious rite and a civil one. The state has no business denying any citizens a courthouse marriage because of their sexual orientation.
(It’s also true that some churches, such as mine, welcome gay marriage. If the government bans marriage out of religious considerations, it favors some religions over others.)
So if Obama is dancing on that thin strand for political reasons, he ought to stop. Fully support gay marriage, Mr. President. The nay-sayers are never going to vote for you, anyway. The rest of us care more about paying the mortgage than we do about somebody else’s marriage.
