©2005 UrbisMedia
Elections, like wars, are complex events in which it is difficult to assign specific causality to outcomes. In a close election amidst a “culture war” that difficulty is amplified in manifold ways. With such a slender electoral vote margin in some states could it be that the slander of the “Swift Boat Veterans,” election and vote counting hank-panky, or something that energized a ”veto group” to turn off “Survivor” or the Shopping Channel and go out and vote, that makes the difference in the end. It is as much the first straw as the last straw that “breaks the camel’s back.”
And so I am left wondering what Karl Rove was thinking when the first newscasts of gays and lesbians getting married in San Francisco and Boston came on the screen. Rove thinks about things politically. Gays and lesbians who want to get married may be thinking a bit politically as well, but mostly, they’re thinking emotionally and symbolically. And I am neither an expert on politics nor homosexuality, but I think that mixing politics with emotion is probably not a good a good idea. It probably wasn’t a good idea with a highly disputed and close national election in the offing.
Rove must have been rubbing his sticky, porcine hands with glee. Talk about being handed a nice big fat one when your guy is a certified liar to his country, and the world hates his guts. Suddenly a nice distraction, something to energize that part of the electorate that sees the hand of Satan at work in so much social change. That part of the electorate that regards sexual behavior between same sex consenting adults as an abomination now had nightly newscasts of cheerful, grateful newly-wedded gays and lesbians to reify the notion of a nation losing its moral, or at least their moral, bearings.
Bush jumped on it with promises to keep marriage hetero, and a pledge to pursue an amendment to the Constitution to do it; Kerry characteristically temporized and then came down on the side of hetero marriage, earning another Purple Heart for shooting himself in the political foot. Kerry seemed unable to learn that with those who weigh the merits of public policy on a scale of the sacred and the profane, there is no advantage in being slightly Left of the Right.
Exit poles surprised many pundits. Moral issue played heavily in Red states, more than anticipated (perhaps other than by porky-fingered Rove). Arguably, they might have made enough of a difference in one or two states – that’s all it takes – to swing the election. Amazingly, Red State people were proving to have stupidity to match their moral zealotry. Never mind that the jerk they were voting for was dismantling the social structure that would be their economic and medical safety net; never mind that his tax cut was blatantly for his rich friends and not them; that his war was not going to be fought by the children of his rich friends; never mind so many things that, because these numb-skulled red staters could see past their King James versions ands their bigotyry, they were clearly not voting in their best interests. It was more important for them to keep their feet on the necks of those immoral people who “chose” the homosexual “lifestyle.”
Could gays and lesbians have waited a few more months? Might Mayor Newsome of San Francisco have had the political prescience to match his moral courage and correctness? Perhaps the thinking was that the 2004 election was going to be a referendum on Bush’s Iraq war and the lies that led up to it, and that what surely must have been “expected” outrage “ from the Christian Right over same-sex marriage would not be politically significant. But in close elections the margins must matter, and those of the Christian Right who might have had their problems with the lies and/or the war and who might have stayed home now had a fresh reason to come out and vote for their “messiah.” Gays and lesbians had become for them “moral terrorists” who were trying to highjack “marriage” and fly smack into the steeples of their churches.
This is not to gainsay or second guess the rectitude of gays and lesbians getting their due and the right to whatever rights and blessings marriage brings to them. This writer is on the record with that in these pages [Nov 03, No. 2.2] and elsewhere. But much of what was “gained” in that effort has already been lost or revoked, and winning a battle and losing a war is not a good stratagem. It is clear that the forces of intolerance and hatred have been buoyed by the results of the election and seek to fortify and consolidate their hold on the party they have hijacked. They have been quick and bold to take aim at the courts (judges) whom they have tagged as “activist” (they are masterful at appropriating language). These “moral terrorists” (I can play the language appropriation game, too) are honing in on completing their sweep of all three brnches of government
The brief, euphoric, and hopeful, period of same-sex marriage seems now to be even less than a Pyrrhic victory and is mired in the political blowback that it produced. That is unfortunate, but it is also politics. It was stated at the beginning of this piece that elections, like war, can be complicated. Sometimes in war it is a good strategy to hold one’s fire until a more propitious moment. We will never know for certain, but it might have been a good strategy for this past election as well.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.4.2005)