IGF CultureWatch

(Washington, D.C., July 4) President Bush will announce today that he has decided to retract his support for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, says a source within the National Security Agency who monitored a presidential telephone call to congressional allies on the subject.

According to the NSA source, the president will make the following statement:

"Throughout my time as your president, I have made difficult decisions because I thought they were in the best interests of the country. I have stood by the principles that make this country great, and that have served it well for more than two centuries, regardless of the political consequences to me and my party. I believe the people should keep more of their money and that low taxes produce prosperity for everyone, so I have backed tax cuts that were demagogically denounced by members of the other party as helping only the rich. I believe you can plan better and invest more wisely for your future than the government can, so I have supported Social Security reform that many say is the 'third rail' of politics. I believe immigration has made this country great and that people who come here to make a better life for themselves deserve a chance to become Americans, so I have backed a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants despite the intense opposition of many members of my own party. And I think this country has a moral duty to help fledgling democracies and to carry through on its commitments, so I have refused to pull our troops out of Iraq despite the rising unpopularity of the war.

"Two years ago, I announced my support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. I strongly believe that's what marriage is and should be. If I were a state legislator or a governor, I'd oppose defining marriage in any other way. I supported the amendment because, at the time, I feared that uncontrollable judges and local officials were recklessly and lawlessly playing with the foundation of the American family.

"But I was wrong. Like others, I overreacted to what seemed like an emergency. I did not have sufficient faith in the historic processes of American government. The local officials who were defying state law in 2004 have been brought into line. DOMA is still good law. The states have begun amending their own constitutions to define marriage. I have appointed many federal judges, including two to the Supreme Court, who will not tamper with marriage. And while I still fear that some state courts will attempt to redefine marriage in years to come, I am confident that the people in those states can deal with their own courts if that is what they choose to do. After all, that is what we have always trusted them to do.

"We may not like the choices some states make about these matters, but if our nation's historic commitment to federalism means anything, it means that the states should, within constitutional limits, be allowed to go their own way on important policy matters. That has been the dominant practice and theory of our federal design for more than two centuries.

"Never before in the history of the country have we amended the Constitution in response to a threatened state court decision. Never before have we amended the Constitution to preempt an anticipated federal court ruling. Never before have we adopted a constitutional amendment to limit the states' ability to control their own family law. Never before have we dictated to states what their own state laws and state constitutions mean. Never before have we amended the Constitution to restrict the ability of the democratic process to expand individual rights. This is no time to start.

"I know this decision will not be popular with many members of my own party. But it is a president's responsibility to lead, not to follow, especially when it comes to matters of important principle. As on so many other decisions I've made, I will not bow to political pressure when I know better. Two years ago, I should have known better. Now I do."

Standing by his side at the news conference will be :

• Vice President Dick Cheney, who said in 2004 that he opposes an amendment because states should be allowed to decide the issue for themselves and that "freedom means freedom for everybody.
  
• Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008.
  
• Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), the main House author of DOMA.
  
• Conservative commentator George Will, who announced on ABC's This Week that he opposes an amendment because state experiments with gay marriage may produce valuable information about whether the reform is worthwhile.
  
• Conservative policy analyst James Q. Wilson, who likened a federal marriage amendment to that conservative bete noire, Roe v. Wade, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal .
  
• And numerous other life-long conservatives who have consistently championed federalism.

Also present will be First Lady Laura Bush, who recently said that the gay-marriage issue should be discussed "sensitively" and should not be used for political purposes.

Karl Rove, the president's senior political advisor, could not be reached for comment.

The news report comes from HSEPA, the Hope Springs Eternal Press Agency.

Listening to President Bush, you'd never know that the nation is having a debate over gay marriage. His Saturday radio address to the nation had no mention of gay couples - or even homosexual individuals. Instead, we hear such things as "Marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith … the commitment of a husband and a wife."

Apparently, for the president, this is an argument of heterosexuals, by heterosexuals and for heterosexuals.

But heterosexuals already have marriage. The reason this debate is going on is because homosexuals do not - and, for the first time, have made the argument that they should.

There is certainly room for disagreement on that point. But to carry on the discussion without even mentioning one entire side is to conduct half an argument.

In this, at least, the president's Christianist supporters - those who use their religion as a political tool - are honest. They do not like homosexuals. Or, when they are being charitable, do not like homosexual "activity."

Their attitude toward lesbians and gay men ranges from hostility to mere condescension. But at least they acknowledge the debate is about homosexuality.

Compare them to the president. He has now addressed this issue publicly in a State of the Union address, in his reelection campaign and in the context of congressional debates over two proposed constitutional amendments that would bar same-sex marriage. But he has yet to address any comments directly to same-sex couples.

The closest he comes to it is to invoke "activist" courts and judges. In a speech Monday, he said that "an amendment to the Constitution is necessary because activist courts have left our nation with no other choice."

But they are "activist" precisely and only to the extent that they have ruled in favor of same-sex couples. In the contorted politics of this issue, courts are subjected to attacks on their good faith and credibility because politicians are not willing to say they do not believe that lesbians and gay men are entitled to equality.

But the irony gets thick when the president purports to be evenhanded in conducting this half-debate. Bush said this in his most recent address on the issue: "As this debate goes forward, we must remember that every American deserves to be treated with tolerance, respect and dignity. All of us have a duty to conduct this discussion with civility and decency toward one another, and all people deserve to have their voices heard."

What Americans is he talking about? The ones he consciously never named in his speech? Does he seriously think lesbians and gay men are being treated with "civility and decency" - much less "tolerance" or "respect" - when he will not meet publicly with a gay or lesbian group on this issue and will not even mention that the debate over same-sex marriage is about them?

It is beyond laughable at this point for the president to say that "all people deserve to have their voices heard" when he is the chief person who will not hear those voices.

If homosexual Americans are not entitled to equal protection, then an honest president would say so and explain why.

We are, perhaps, beyond believing this president to be honest. But if he is to be congratulated by the Christianists for bowing to their wishes, shouldn't they, at least, require him to say what he means?

The answer, apparently, is no. They know exactly what he means and exactly who he is talking about. And if he is less manifest in his dismissal of gays and lesbians than they, his may be the greater insult for being so much more indifferent.

For decades now, lesbians and gay men have been open about our sexual orientation. But the president's message to his supporters is that we should just stick with what worked for so long - at least for heterosexuals. If lesbians and gay men won't go back in the closet, he will do what he can to impose one.

Like that proverbial bad penny, the administration-backed Marriage Protection Amendment to exclude gay and lesbian couples from the protections of marriage is back with us.

I write prior to the scheduled debate during the week of June 5th, but there seems general agreement that the vote for cloture will receive not more than 52 or 53 votes, well short of the 60 votes required and far short of the 67 votes required for passage of the amendment itself.

There is also general agreement that GOP leaders who are pushing the amendment know their effort will fail and are going through this charade prior to the 2006 congressional elections to placate restive social conservatives who believe the Administration is not paying enough attention to their concerns-as if any administration could.

Not that those voters would vote for a Democrat, but they might stay at home and not vote, giving Democrats a comparative advantage. So the amendment functions as an Incumbent Protection Amendment for conservative Republicans.

I for one would like to see the amendment come to a vote since its defeat would be a convincing political victory for gays. Equally, it would be good to get senators on record about the amendment itself instead of the surrogate issue of cloture so we know who our friends are and who is just mouthing support when convenient.

But Democrats are dead set against allowing a vote on the amendment. They want the issue to go away. Above all, they want to avoid having to vote against constitutionally barring gays from marriage because that would expose vulnerable Democrats to Republican charges of coddling homosexuals. So the vote against cloture is a Democratic Incumbent Protection ploy.

For the same reason, only one senate Democrat, Sen. Ted Kennedy, spoke in favor of gay marriage in 2004. Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold is reportedly willing to support gay marriage this time around, and that is excellent news, but the rest of the Democrats are trotting out any reason they can think of to oppose the amendment other than the notion that gays should actually be able to marry.

They say: We do not want to alter a sacred national document; marriage should be left to the states; Congress has more pressing issues to worry about; this is a harmfully divisive issue; or this is just a GOP sop to the religious right-anything but supporting gay marriage itself. That's sad.

But the shameful thing is that our supposed gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign does no better. HRC president Joe Salmonese said, "The president should stop threatening to put discrimination in our Constitution and use valuable airtime as an opportunity to lay out an agenda to address the challenges facing our country. President Bush is pandering to far-right extremists and making divisive, discriminatory politics his priority."

True enough, but do you see anything actually pro-gay in this? Instead of using this unprecedented media opportunity to advance good arguments for gay marriage to skeptical but open-minded Americans, instead of explaining why gay marriage is-as writer Jonathan Rauch argues-"good for gays, good for straights, and good for America," Solmonese merely parrots Democratic excuses.

Nothing could make clearer that the HRC is more interested in providing cover for Democrats than in promoting gay equality. Salmonese cannot even bring himself to call the amendment a Marriage Exclusion Amendment or a Marriage Prohibition Amendment, although either might be a useful rhetorical counter thrust.

Are we going to go through this every two years? It seems so, at least for a while. Conservative Republicans say that even if the amendment fails to pass this time, efforts to promote it now can build momentum for eventual passage. But they are surely whistling past the graveyard of soon-to-be-defunct political initiatives.

Polls over the last two decades show a continuing rise in tolerance for and acceptance of gays. Polls also show a slow decline in support for a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. If present trends continue, Americans will eventually come to see gay marriage as acceptable. So If Republicans cannot pass the amendment now, their chances in the future seem increasingly bleak.

The American people have come far in the last half-century-from criminalized homosexual activity in every state to supporting openly gay people in the military and seriously arguing about gay marriage. Our job is to make sure that progress continues by explaining the case for marriage whenever we have the opportunity to parents, relatives, friends, and when possible in the public square, steadily, calmly and without rancor.

We feared for our lives; we prayed for a remedy. What none of us in the gay world imagined, when word of a mysterious affliction surfaced 25 years ago, was what proved to be the epidemic's most important moral legacy: AIDS transformed the gay-marriage movement from implausible to inevitable.

In May 1970, two men applied for a marriage license in Minnesota and then filed suit after being refused. The gay world hardly noticed. "Support for marriage was a distinctly minority position in the gay and lesbian movement," wrote the historian George Chauncey. "After an initial flurry of activity, marriage virtually disappeared as a goal of the movement."

Marriage, after all, hardly seemed relevant. The master narrative for gay life was: come out, leave home, gorge at the banquet of sexual liberation. Gay men celebrated their image as sexual rebels; straight America was happy to consign them to that role. After 1981, the master narrative changed from ubiquitous sex to ubiquitous death. Death became, as the writer Andrew Sullivan noted at the height of the epidemic, not just an event in gay America but "an environment." For the stricken there were lesions, chills, wasting, death; for friends and lovers, there was grief compounded by despair.

But there was also an epidemic of care giving. Lovers, friends and AIDS "buddies" were spooning food, emptying bedpans, holding wracked bodies through the night. They were assuming the burdens of marriage at its hardest. They were also showing that no relative, government program or charity is as dependable or consoling as a dedicated partner.

Yet gay partners were strangers to each other in the law's eyes. They were ineligible for spousal health insurance that they desperately needed; they were often barred from hospital rooms, locked out of homes they had shared for years, even shut out of the country if they were foreign citizens. Their love went unmentioned at funerals; their bequests were challenged and ignored. Heterosexual couples solved all those problems with a $30 marriage license. Gay couples couldn't solve them at any price.

Though few said so (no one wanted to be callous, not with people dying), many also knew that the culture of promiscuity and alienation was a culture of death. In 1981, I was 21 and terrified of coming out. I feared disease and discrimination, but even more I feared the cultural isolation and anomie of the gay ghetto. If being gay meant rejecting mainstream values, having disconnected sex and then dying, I wanted no part of it.

To me, the idea of same-sex marriage sounded like the Coast Guard's hail to a castaway. It promised a new narrative: of commitment, of connectedness, of a community bound by stories of love, not death. For many gay people, the logic of marriage became as compelling as it had once been contemptible.

The public changed, too. Support for legal same-sex relations reached its nadir in the second half of the 1980's, according to Gallup polling, but the 1990's brought a surprise. The share of the public saying consensual same-sex relations should be legal rebounded and then became a majority, as did the percentage saying homosexuality "should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle."

Watching gays become family to each other, the public saw nobility. AIDS reminded the country that a good marriage is the best public-health measure known to man. "Gay marriage," so recently an oxymoron, began to make sense.

Yes, the idea of same-sex marriage predated AIDS. But would gay America have internalized as deeply the need for marriage if it had not first internalized H.I.V.? Would straight America have been as willing to consider gay marriage if not for AIDS? Impossible. In gay cultural history, marriage is to AIDS much as Israel is to the Holocaust in Jewish cultural history. It offers a safer shore, a better life, and a promise: never again.