First published on March 6, 2004, in National Journal.
Copyright © 2004, National Journal.
In a small Texas church in 1977, a young man named George W.
Bush married a young woman named Laura Lane Welch. Their marriage
changed them both. "She is the steel in his back," a reporter who
knew them told CNN.com in 2001. "She is a civilizing influence on
him."
A civilizing influence: If marriage's magic - for individuals,
for couples, for communities, for countries - were to be reduced to
a phrase, that would be it. If President Bush were asked what was
the single most important day of his life, I imagine he might
choose, not the day he was chosen president, nor the day his twin
daughters were born, but the day he united his life with Laura
Welch's. Marriage civilizes, comforts, nourishes. Possibly no man
in the country knows this better than Bush.
I hope, then, that it was with some measure of agony that, on
February 24, he called for the Constitution to be amended to define
marriage as a union of a man and a woman. At that moment, the
occupant of the office once held by Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, and Abraham Lincoln declared that millions of Americans
should be forever denied what is, after freedom itself, the
greatest blessing of civic life: the opportunity to marry the
person you love.
Now, I am not to be trusted in this matter. I am gay, coupled,
and an advocate of same-sex marriage, thus condemned to view Bush's
announcement through a scrim of disappointment and anger. Still,
when I do my best to set my bias aside, and with the benefit of
more than a week's cooling off, it seems to me that Bush's
announcement amounted to a failure of moral and political vision,
of empathy and imagination, that is symptomatic of a larger decline
of his presidency.
Bush is no bigot. He is said to treat his gay acquaintances with
kindness, and he is in good company in opposing same-sex marriage.
A robust majority of the public is against gay marriage, as are
most leading Democrats and 3,000 years of Western tradition. To tar
everyone who rejects the idea as bigoted is to smear millions of
Americans who wish their gay fellow-citizens no ill.
Bush, however, not only rejects gay marriage. He also opposes
(though would not federally ban) civil union, as the nonmarital
legal recognition of gay unions is often called. In his view, gay
couples should have no formal legal status or protection of any
kind.
More: In the course of his speech, as indeed in the course of
his presidency, the word "gay" or "homosexual" did not pass his
lips. He had nothing to say about the people to whom he would deny
the irreplaceable blessings of marriage, and nothing to say
specifically to them. It was as if a politician, a century ago, had
announced his support for an amendment that would forever ban women
from voting in any election on U.S. soil, and had done so in a
speech carefully crafted to avoid mentioning women or even using a
feminine pronoun. The message of Bush's omission, intended or
otherwise, must surely be: Gay Americans are of no interest or
concern to this president. Gay couples are invisible.
Perhaps Bush is morally myopic, a Mr. Magoo who sees gay people
only when he physically collides with them. More likely, he takes
the view that homosexuality is a personal and private idiosyncrasy,
indeed a sin, of which public policy should take no formal notice.
Gay couples, in this view, should feel free to draw up private
contracts and wills of whatever sort they please, but they should
go unnoticed by law and public policy.
Surely, if he stopped to think about it, Bush would realize that
marriage conveys a host of benefits that no interpersonal contract
can provide. He must be aware that only marriage can protect
spouses from having to testify against one another under oath.
(How, I wonder, would Bush feel knowing his wife could be
subpoenaed as a witness against him by the next Kenneth Starr?) He
must be aware that a bequest to a legally "unrelated" beneficiary
is easily challenged by greedy or vindictive relatives. He must be
aware that marriage is no mere legal contract between two
individuals; it is a promise that spouses make not just to each
other but to their community and in their community's eyes.
When I gave a speech a few months ago, I was surprised to find
my host not in attendance. When I asked why, I learned he was at
home taking care of his dying male partner. Bush, apparently, sees
neither nobility nor public benefit in this union. Apparently he
sees no union at all. Just individuals doing their thing. Nothing
to bother himself about.
There is another Bush, the one who grappled with the ethics of
stem-cell research in 2001, the one who in that case delivered a
national address exquisitely weighing the moral claims of well and
sick and born and unborn.
Contrast that with the cool five minutes or so he gave same-sex
marriage, the studied omission of any concern for the moral claims
or welfare of 10 million or more gay Americans, and the refusal to
offer them civil unions or any other consolation for their
disenfranchisement. However intended, his performance was the most
callous by an important American public official since the days of
segregation.
The failure of moral imagination was exceeded, if that was
possible, by the failure of political imagination. At his best,
Bush in the past has shown an unusual facility for finding new ways
out of old boxes. Refusing to choose between unacceptable
alternatives, he shifts the paradigm instead. After September 11,
he recognized right away that long-standing American policy for the
Arab world was obsolete. In the Middle East, when told he had to
accept unending conflict or bestow a state upon the likes of Yasir
Arafat, he chose neither, instead linking Palestinian statehood to
Palestinian democratization. It was this Bush who promised, for a
while, the most creative and generative presidency since the days
of FDR and Truman - so much so, that I called him "the accidental
radical" in these pages.
But then there is the Bush who shruggingly signed an expensive
and reactionary farm bill, a much more expensive if not quite so
reactionary Medicare expansion, a command-and-control campaign
finance law straight from the 1970s. There is the Bush who in
January proposed, despite burgeoning deficits, an increase for the
National Endowment for the Arts, a pleasant frivolity that sprays a
mist of federal subsidy into a torrent of private funding for the
arts and entertainment. And now the gay-marriage ban.
Americans haven't made up their minds about gay marriage and
don't want to be rushed, either by liberal courts or by
conservative Constitution-amenders. Most Americans, including many
conservatives, believe the matter should be settled at a deliberate
pace by the several states. The U.S. Supreme Court is unlikely to
impose one state's gay marriages on the whole country, but if Bush
wanted to be sure, he might have proposed an amendment saying, for
instance, "Nothing in this Constitution requires any state or the
federal government to recognize anything other than the union of
one man and one woman as a marriage." In that or some other way, he
might have transcended the all-or-nothing choice presented to him
by religious conservatives. He might thereby have poured water on
the fires of the culture war.
Instead he chose gasoline. If extremism means opting for the
most extreme alternative available, Bush is objectively an
extremist. The most important portion of his February 24
announcement was this sentence: "Furthermore, even if the Defense
of Marriage Act is upheld, the law does not protect marriage within
any state or city." Translation: Preventing federal courts from
pre-empting the states is not enough. On not a single square inch
of U.S. territory can even one same-sex marriage ever be allowed,
even if all the people in the relevant jurisdiction want it and
even if no other jurisdiction would be required to accept it. In a
country with a three-century tradition that wisely leaves domestic
law to states and localities, Bush's proposed amendment amounts to
ruthless totalism: scorched earth.
Bush is by temperament no extremist, especially on cultural
issues; and when he thinks his way through a problem and knows his
own mind, he is unafraid of activists who demand their way or the
highway. What remains is to guess that Bush caved in to extremism
on same-sex marriage because he failed to engage. Increasingly he
seems to make conventional choices within a political environment
that he accepts as a given. The gay-marriage failure is the latest
in a series of decisions suggesting political senescence.
What a pity if the imagination that once characterized Bush at
his best is sputtering out, giving way to the politics of
palliation and placation. What a shame to see the accidental
radical become an accidental reactionary.
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