Whose Wedge Is It?
Point a finger at Lambda Legal, not at the White House.
— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center. NRO
In the fierce biennial battle among federal candidates for the broad (often politically undereducated) middle — that exasperating camp of moderates in love with moderation for moderation's sake, the porridge-just-right temperature-takers — it matters who started the fight on the political issues of the day.
So when it comes to the burgeoning controversy over what proponents call "gay marriage," the media and their Democratic friends would love to replay the fading cassette loop of their 1992 convention spin that the two sides of the political debate over homosexuality are very different. On one side is the earnest, reasonable (and definitively not liberal) advocates of equality and justice who wait patiently for the end of "marriage discrimination." No one tends to mention their standing as part of the hard-core ideological base of the Democrats. On the other side is the frightening gauntlet of the "anti-gay" — presented as the hard-edged, strident, exclusionary religious extremists, who clearly will be the ruin of the Republican future.
During the 1992 convention, NBC's Tom Brokaw insisted to Pat Buchanan: "You gave the impression that if you're not a white, heterosexual, Christian, anti-abortion, anti-environment, you're somehow not welcome in the Republican party." Then on election night, he told Pat Robertson: "There are many people in the Republican party who believe that the Republican National Convention in Houston, at which you were a prominent part, was simply too extreme, too strident in its positions, and they cite your speech and Pat Buchanan's speech as well." From the White House's take on gay issues, you'd think Karl Rove watches this footage to remind himself never to have his candidate get caught dead in that media trap.
Buchanan's speech called Bill Clinton and Al Gore the "most pro-gay and lesbian ticket in American history." That was a fact. In office, President Clinton dragged the military left into don't-ask-don't-tell policies. That was starting a fight. That was divisive. Still, in 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act to assuage voter fears about an approaching homosexual revolution. Now, every one of the Democratic contenders is more pro-gay than Clinton and Gore just eight years ago.
But John Kerry wants the TV audience to think so-called "gay marriage" is a fight eagerly started by the White House. On the January 25 Face the Nation, he said: "I respect the sanctity of marriage. I think marriage is the oldest institution in the world, and it is important for us to honor it. But I think the president is trying to drive a wedge again in America."
Any reporter, pundit, or blogger who thinks this "wedge issue" originates with the White House hasn't paid any attention in the last three years. Bush spokesmen hate to touch the issue, even when reporters try to make them. The Log Cabin Republicans have been invited into the White House, and President Bush has appointed two openly gay leaders as his "AIDS czar" and an openly gay ambassador to Romania. He refused to state any opposition to the District of Columbia's fight for domestic-partners ordinances in the D.C. appropriations bill. At the end of his first year in office, the capital's gay newspaper,The Washington Blade, told its readers he really wasn't so bad. In short, he's not been a fierce fighter for the "Religious Right" against the "Gay Left." He's been a mild-mannered Clark Kent at best.
Since the so-called "gay-marriage" issue began bubbling up as a national matter, President Bush has routinely responded to every inquiry by talking about his own sin, the log in his own eye, as a way of defusing anyone who would think he privately does the Church Lady "superiority dance" in the Oval Office when nobody's looking. And he's the divider, Mr. Wedge Issue? Kerry knows better, and so should everyone else.
If it matters who started this "wedge issue," it clearly begins with those seeking to overturn the status quo, and that's the gay-Left legal lobby, led by the Lambda Legal defense fund. The homosexual "marriage" campaign began on Dec. 17, 1990, when three couples in Hawaii attempted to secure marriage licenses. When they were refused, they filed suit in May 1991 against the state's department of health. A judge declared in favor of the three couples in 1993, suggesting they were denied equal protection under the state's constitution. As the Hawaii ruling approached finality in 1996, 16 state legislatures quickly passed laws that would prevent gay couples from using the full faith-and-credit clause of Article IV of the Constitution to argue that a marriage recognized in Hawaii should be recognized in other states.
What followed in the next few years was a pattern of judicial activism (courts discovering in state constitutions the right for homosexuals to marry), followed by popular revolt (voters and politicians amending laws and constitutions). The same pattern may emerge in Massachusetts. Voters in Hawaii and Alaska both responded in the fall of 1998 by adding defense-of-marriage amendments to their state constitutions by overwhelming margins. In 2000, Vermont's highest court pushed the legislature into creating "civil unions." In response, Vermont voters removed 11 civil-union backers in the Vermont house, and left the Senate with only a two-seat majority in favor of civil unions. That momentum dissipated a bit in the 2002 cycle, but it's not a promising political arc for comfortable liberal and moderate career politicians.
Generally speaking, it is the libertine Left that is pushing for a radical remaking of the status quo. It is the libertine Left that is driving activist judges into ordering legislatures around like servants. It is the libertine Left that pumps money into liberal candidates and demands orthodoxy from Democratic politicians. It is the libertine Left that is driving Democratic candidates and the media into declaring that somehow, civil unions are now "in the middle," instead of 97 percent of the way toward "gay marriage." It wouldn't be fair or accurate to pin the divisiveness charge on the Right and only the Right.
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