Gay Marriage a Tricky Issue for Democrats

A generation hence, and possibly as soon as January 2005, the threat to
America's families posed by the dread specter of gay marriage will seem
as quaint and chimerical as hysteria about "race-mixing" or flouridated
water. (Or, for that matter, fear of backwoods Southerners inspired in
suburban moviegoers by films like "Deliverance.") All but congenital
bigots will realize that everybody needs love, that desire is felt like
gravity, that people no more choose to be gay than they choose
left-handedness, and that homosexuality's not catching. With
understanding comes tolerance and compassion.

Unfortunately for Democrats, however, the next presidential election
will be contested in 2004. And despite brave words to the contrary from
commentators on the left, the issue puts the Democratic nominee in
considerable peril.

Writing in The American Prospect, for example, Matthew Yglesias notes a
recent USA Today/ Gallup Poll showing that "just 48 percent of the
public believes gay marriages 'will change our society for the
worse,'and 50 percent feels the change would either be an improvement or
have no effect."

Yglesias hopefully concludes that the "crucial middle ground...is held
not by gay bashers but by people who basically don't care." Since
elections are customarily won or lost in the middle, he thinks "the
political dynamics of gay rights may pose more problems for Republicans
than for Democrats." He reasons that the issue will spotlight the Jerry
Falwells, Pat Robertsons and other panhandling Jeremiahs, thus reminding
swing voters of everything they don't like about the GOP.

With due respect, Yglesias is dreaming. First, in today's America, fear
is an easier sell than understanding; the committed trump the
indifferent in electoral contests almost every time. Secondly, as with
race, people rarely confess bigotry to strangers over the phone. Their
real feelings emerge in the privacy of the voting booth. Most important,
as Democrats ought to have learned for good in 2000, national polls mean
little in the individual states where presidential elections are
contested.

And state by state, the gay marriage issue is potentially devastating to
any Democrat, particularly in the South and everywhere else west of the
Hudson and east of Reno where rural and small town values predominate.
Vermont and Massachusetts court decisions mandating an end to
discrimination against gay couples would help oppportunistic Republicans
frame the election as elitist
judges and effete New Englanders versus good country people. The
symbolism could prove deadly.

Losing them all, however, would likely finish the Democratic hopeful.
Assertions to the contrary by some party tacticians assume that a
candidate culturally unacceptable to Southern voters could somehow carry
states like Missouri and Ohio--unlikely at best. Former Georgia Sen.
Max Cleland, the Vietnam war hero smeared as unpatriotic during his
losing re-election campaign, sees what's coming. 2004, he told Salon,
will be "about gay marriage." "It'll be slime and defend, as it always
is," he said. "And it will be the ugliest political campaign, aboveboard
and below board, in the
history of the country."

Conservative culture warriors are tooling up. The right-wing press is
filled with crackpot fantasies: mobsters marrying each other to avoid
testifying, fathers marrying sons to avoid estate taxes, etc. Catholic
bishops and cardinals have portrayed the Massachusetts decision as
morally abhorrent, hard to take given the church's sickening cover-up of
pedophile priests. Evangelical cleric Rev. Louis Sheldon, of the
Traditional Values Coalition, speaks of becoming "a resisting
force...against those who would like to call
evil good"--language normally reserved for terrorists.

Not for nothing did President Bush's reaction to the Massachusetts
ruling stress that "marriage is a SACRED institution between a man and a
woman." [my emphasis] In reality, no Democratic presidential candidate
favors gay marriage as such; all back "civil unions" conveying state,
not religious, approval. Indeed, Americans aren't supposed to look to
politicians to define the sacred.

Unfortunately, to millions of Southern evangelicals, marriage vs. civil
unions seems a distinction without a difference. They see Bush's
theological effrontery as common sense. If the GOP gets its way, across
the entire region, the 2004 contest will resemble Bush's vicious 2000
South Carolina primary vs. John McCain, with the president striking
statesmanlike poses while his surrogates do the dirty work: push-polling
and whisper campaigns that'll all but turn the Democratic
ticket--assuming both candidates are men--into husband and wife.

There may be ways for Democrats to counter what's coming, but pretending
the threat isn't real won't work. Neither will simply sitting back and
waiting for Republicans to overplay their hand.