Every public discussion of gay issues in America is packed with ambiguity, nuance, and double meaning. This is an egalitarian and liberty-loving country with strong religious faith: Majorities oppose anti-gay discrimination in employment and in the military, but also oppose gay marriage and still believe that homosexual acts are immoral. While most people are comfortable having a gay co-worker, they'd never want a son or daughter to be gay.
The presidential campaign has reflected, and the candidates have manipulated, the country's deep ambivalence about homosexuality.
The Bush Bypass
George W. Bush has developed a stock response to almost any gay-related question. It involves both substantively opposing gay equality and rhetorically reassuring everyone he's not a bigot, all without ever using the word "gay."
Consider Bush's various statements on gay marriage over the past year. Collected and condensed, they amount to this:
"I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Activist judges and local officials are trying to change this definition, so we must protect marriage. But as we debate this, let's treat everyone with dignity and respect."
The man-and-woman mantra of the first sentence enjoys 70 percent support in elections, but especially appeals to religious conservatives. The second sentence exploits populist resentment of the judiciary. The third, Bush's dignity-and-respect mantra, pivots to reassure gays and their friends and families that Bush doesn't hate gay people.
No matter what the question, Bush almost never actually uses the word gay. (He never uses the word homosexual, either. It is too clinical and old-fashioned for some, too explicit for others.) A substantial part of his political-religious base rejects the idea that there are, properly speaking, "gay people" or homosexuals. For them, the words homosexual or gay are adjectives, not nouns. They describe an act, not a person.
Any time the subject comes up, Bush wants gays and gay-friendly people to interpret his words as a humanitarian concession without having religious conservatives interpret them as any kind of political concession. It is a nice rhetorical trick that plays on the hopes and fears of everyone.
The Kerry Cutoff
John Kerry has a different challenge but plays similar rhetorical tricks. While he has a long Senate record of supporting gay equality, he never mentions gay issues in his presidential campaign unless asked about them.
Even when asked, his answers have gotten increasingly Delphic. His stock response on gay issues now involves confirming he supports liberty while reassuring us he's not for license.
So while he supported letting gays serve in the military during the Democratic primaries, Kerry has since voiced concerns about "unit cohesion" and morale. These are code words for opposing gays in the military.
On gay marriage, Kerry always deploys the man-and-woman mantra. (See above.) Asked to defend his position, he invokes his "religious" convictions. That's a nod to religious conservatives.
When Missouri passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriages - before a single judge there had ordered the state to recognize such marriages - Kerry told the mainstream media he had "no problem" with the amendment. Advised later by a gay reporter that the amendment also banned civil unions, Kerry said he opposed it. Informed still later that the amendment did not in fact ban civil unions, his campaign said he had no position.
So, as Kerry might put it, he actually did support the amendment before he opposed it before he was neutral.
The Edwards Exposè
Most richly ambiguous of all was the performance of John Edwards in the vice presidential debate. Asked about gay marriage, Edwards peppered his response with the man-and-woman mantra no fewer than three times while declaring his opposition to a constitutional amendment and his support for largely unspecified "benefits" for gay couples.
And here is how Edwards began his answer:
"Let me first say that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy."
Highlighting the homosexuality of an opponent's child is a very odd way to begin an answer. While the moderator's question itself had vaguely referred to Cheney's "family experience," nothing in it stated that Cheney's daughter is gay. Edwards must have known that his own comments would be the first time millions of people would hear about it. Why would he introduce this fact into a nationally televised debate?
To many listeners, Edwards' answer humanized the gay-marriage issue by calling attention to the effect that denying marriage has on the lives of actual people. It also affirmed the morality of loving one's own children, gay or not. That message needs to be heard by families who have rejected gay children.
But learning of Cheney's gay daughter likely had a very different effect on some of Bush's conservative supporters. It suggested that the administration might not be as trustworthy on gay issues as they had thought. After all, Edwards just told them that the Cheney half of the Bush-Cheney ticket has been infiltrated by the enemy.
Did Edwards intend to produce that homophobic but politically useful effect? He predictably denies any double-meaning. Such is the complexity of talk about gay issues in this country that we can't be sure.
[Editor's note: The above was penned shortly before the final Bush-Kerry debate in which Kerry similarly raised the issue of Mary Cheney's sexuality, about which the author comments in a subsequent column.]