Raw Prejudice
The politics of gay marriage
Just two years ago, Senator Kerry joined his Democratic congressional colleagues from the Bay State in signing a letter to the state Legislature urging it to drop a proposed amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution banning same-sex nuptials. Then, last week, in his latest flip-flop, candidate Kerry endorsed the anti-gay-marriage, state constitutional amendment now pending before the Legislature. Even his hometown daily, the Boston Globe— which has endorsed him — editorially denounced Kerry’s support for the “odious” state amendment that would “single out one class of people for separate treatment” by defying the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision on gay marriage. “Equal, the SJC has ringingly declared, is equal,” thundered the Globe.
Bush’s support for the FMA validates the fear and hatred which says that lesbians and gays are less-than-human, second-class citizens who should be maintained in a state of civil quarantine. And that blessing of bigotry will lead to an inevitable upswing in violent physical attacks on and harassment of gays — just as the anti-homosexual rhetoric deployed in the debate over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But there is no moral difference between writing discrimination into the U.S. Constitution and writing it into the Massachusetts Constitution. Kerry’s position makes him as complicit as Bush in the coming surge of anti-gay violence.
The polls are not encouraging, for the anti-gay backlash continues. The Washington Post poll out February 25 showed support for the FMA up eight points in just a month, in the wake of the Massachusetts court decision and San Francisco’s weddings.
And a Pew poll two days later found that “Gay marriage is a more powerful social issue for voters than either abortion or gun control” and that two-thirds of the country opposes it. Bush’s appeals to raw prejudice may well work.
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