“We’re not talking about discrimination…”

This clip from the last Iowa debate is a good landmark to locate where gay rights are today and where the GOP is in that cell of the country’s public policy matrix.

Mitt Romney is struggling to be a moderate in his party that finds moderation abhorrent. Rick Santorum is proud of his immoderation in general, and his intemperance on gay marriage in particular. He finds Romney squishy, and Chris Wallace uses his privilege as debate questioner to make Romney squirm on Santorum’s behalf.

Squirm he does. Romney says he is “firmly in support of people not being discriminated against based upon their sexual orientation.” But without pause or turn signal, he continues: “At the same time, I oppose same-sex marriage. That has been my position from the beginning.”

Romney’s dilemma is that he really has supported gay equality, and may still. He invokes a member of his Massachusetts administration’s cabinet who was gay, to buttress his fair mindedness. But he distinguishes gay equality from same-sex marriage. That’s not a matter of equality, it’s . . . well, something else.

Santorum doesn’t have that nuance to worry about. While he, too claims not to discriminate based on sexual orientation, he isn’t weighed down in the debates by a need to appeal to voters who worry much about the gays.

Clearly, there was a time – and to many Americans we’re still in it – when to say you were both for gay equality and against same-sex marriage were consistent, or at least could coexist without much cognitive dissonance. Lesbians and gay men deserve to be treated the same as everyone else, they just can’t get married to one another. However, they can marry someone who’s of the opposite sex.

The inherent contradiction in those thoughts is now apparent to a large and growing number of Americans. How on earth is it equal that homosexuals should have all the rights of heterosexuals except the one that goes to the core of actually being homosexual – the right to marry someone you love who, because you are homosexual, will be the same sex as you?

Romney is caught in that contradiction, and that is his tragedy this year. Equality under the law is not divisible in this way, and the dwindling number of people who insist on the rhetoric of equality without the substance look more and more preposterous with each passing year.  As a party, the Democrats have finally accepted this cultural change, and few of their candidates will be dogged by it.

Santorum’s tragedy is longer-term and more lasting. He has thrown himself in with the crowd that doesn’t mind contradicting itself openly and proudly – so much so that they have worked hard and frozen into place, in state constitutions, second-class status for same-sex couples, a status they refuse to view as unequal. They got in right under the wire on that, but no one can freeze politics in place. The GOP will continue to have Santorums, but it shouldn’t be surprising, by the time 2016 rolls around, to see them doing the squirming over what it means to have equal rights.

5 Comments for ““We’re not talking about discrimination…””

  1. posted by Houndentenor on

    Wait…if both Santorum and Romney claim to be for equal rights for gay people does that mean they support the end of DADT and adding gays to ENDA?

    Why do moderators let candidates get away with saying they are for equal rights when they clearly are not?

  2. posted by Doug on

    Romney has supported most everything at least once in the past 20 years. Who knows what he truly believes at any given moment in time. He cannot be trusted.

  3. posted by Seth on

    I cannot believe you are wasting “ink” on Santorum, who is polling in low single digits everywhere. No one takes him seriously, except for religious cranks and Israeli-Firsters (pardon the redundancy; mostly the same groups that support Romney). Santorum is presently not a contender, nor a threat to anyone. If he should become one, god help us all.

    • posted by Jorge on

      The pattern I’ve seen with Rick Santorum is that for every mistake he makes and every two times he falters, is one time he says something strong enough for people to take notice. And unfortunately for Santorum, when that happens you see the other leading candidates (or the balance of the polling) shift a bit in his direction, while he remains in the back. He owned the floor on the other candidates’ faltering and inconsistent positions on states rights. He was the first candidate who came out strong on an interventionist, assertive foreign policy–on that especially we’ve seen a shift to the point that it’s Newt Gingrich (the only other candidate I think is a passing hawk) become the front-runner. What Romney has done is set himself apart from Santorum on gay rights (although frankly he should *not* have attacked Romney in that instance). The other contenders will try to mirror him or screen themselves from him.

  4. posted by Jorge on

    He squirmed a lot less than Santorum did on gay rights under the same questioner. I disagree with you. Wallace made Santorum look ridiculous on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and he barely pulled out anything remotely sounding reasonable in their exchange on Fox News Sunday. In this debate, Romney did not squirm. He interrupted Wallace and took an opportunity to express a moderate position on gay rights that Chris Wallace was not going to give him credit for. He pushed back. And I think in the process Romney was able to make it appear that he has not flip-flopped or changed his views on gay rights at all.

    Wait…if both Santorum and Romney claim to be for equal rights for gay people does that mean they support the end of DADT and adding gays to ENDA?

    Why do moderators let candidates get away with saying they are for equal rights when they clearly are not?

    Because we’re not so big on demanding equal rights in the first place. What we want is that quality of life stuff that we can see in our own lives.

    Mitt Romney turned a dirty political secret on its head when he said that the Republican party is not beholden to the gay rights movement, so that means he can be an effective advocate for–I remember him saying gay rights. But that means it’s going to be coming from Romney, not necessarily from, shall we say, special interest groups.

    So they will not toe the special interest line and say that gays only have equal rights if they get everything they want. So get rid of that habit of attaching the word “equal” to everything you want. It’s a dumb quasi-socialist conception that boils down to everyone wants to be the same as the Joneses. Demand that the candidate explain “how are you going to protect and value people like me”, ask about “gay rights”, and that’s where you’ll see it.

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