The Best Man

by on

John Kasich is hitting the right notes in calling for both religious conservatives and progressive LGBT activists (and their followers) to stop behaving like authoritarians, so of course both religious conservatives and progressive LGBT activists (and their followers) mock and condemn him—his advice would disrupt their mutual grievance games for fun, profit and power over others.

Via a Washington Blade report with the misleading headline (because he’s not addressing discrimination against employees), Kasich: LGBT people who face discrimination should ‘get over it’, discussing Kasich’s position on small business owners who don’t want to provide services to same-sex weddings:

Urging people to “calm down,” the governor said the country needs to protect religious liberty, but also can’t allow discrimination, so must “strike a balance” on the issue. “What I like to say is, just relax, if you don’t like what somebody is doing, pray for them,” Kasich said. “And if you feel as though somebody is doing something wrong against you, can you just for a second get over it because this thing will settle down?”

Kasich lamented the issue has “become a wedge issue that can be exploited by people on both sides,” saying the country should be the United States and not the “Divided States.”

He’s right, of course. But good luck with that position in today’s polarized politics.

6 Comments for “The Best Man”

  1. posted by tom jefferson 3rd on

    Yes, he is the nearest thing to a moderate, Rockerfella Republican in this presidential election.

    He has not done well in Republican party primaries. His public speaking skills need work, at least from what I have heard from his own mouth.

    Again, he runs into a big problem; a significant number of primary voters and big primary donors think that evolution is a myth, gay people and Muslims are not born free and equal.

    I suspect Clinton has a similar position. She is more comfortable in the political center.

  2. posted by Houndentenor on

    Is Kasich still running? And if so, why? 148 delegates? *eyeroll*

  3. posted by Mike in Houston on

    Yes indeed, Kasich — how do you pronounce that, can’t he change the spelling? — is what passes for reasonable in what’s left of the GOP field… hooray!

    But of course, the others would come to that same reasonable conclusion if it weren’t for those “Evil Progressives&trade” forcing a right-wing backlash.

  4. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Kasich’s “get over it” advice is similar to the advice most of us would give to our gay and lesbian friends, although most of us would probably phrase it “let it go” rather than “get over it”. “Let it go” is the advice, certainly, that I would give to friends.

    But “let it go” is only half the story. Business owners should not be defying the law. As Kasich said in February:

    [I]f you’re a cupcake maker and somebody wants a cupcake, make them a cupcake. Let’s not have a big lawsuit or argument over all this stuff — move on. The next thing, you know, they might be saying, if you’re divorced you shouldn’t get a cupcake.

    Kasich is, as Tom Jefferson pointed out, as close to a “moderate” as the Republican Party gets in recent times, but that isn’t a high bar. However, Kasich bears no resemblance, as Tom Jefferson suggests (in my view incorrectly), to moderate Republicans of an earlier era like Nelson Rockefeller.

    Kasich is miles more conservative than the moderates of even a couple of decades ago, like Republican Wisconsin Governor Lee Dreyfuss, who signed the nation’s first civil rights legislation barring discrimination against gays and lesbians in jobs and housing in 1982, and spoke out against Wisconsin’s anti-marriage amendment in 2006. Almost all of them are gone now, forced out of office. The last moderate Republican standing in Wisconsin was State Senator Dale Schultz, who was forced out of office in 2012.

    In any event, Kasich has not shown any inclination to join in the current Republican hysteria over “religious freedom” bills. I suspect that Kasich understands the crass political cynicism, the religious hypocrisy, the substantive hollowness, and the bigoted animus that undergirds the current hysteria, and wants no part of it.

    I wish more Republicans would look beyond appeasing conservative Christians and take the longer view.

  5. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Kasich remains in the race because (1) he thinks (probably incorrectly) that Caligula and Cromwell might both fail to nail down the nomination, leaving him an opening at the convention, and (2) he thinks (correctly, based on exit polling in New York) that if he gets out, many of the votes that he is picking up would go to Trump, particularly in the primaries next week.

    Whatever his reasoning, Kasich provided some much-need humor (of an “Oh, my G-d, I can’t believe he did that …” variety) in New York.

    I think that the word for him is “galumpher”.

Comments are closed.