Republicans exploit the Federal Marriage Amendment — again
by Susan Ryan-Vollmar
Originally published by Bay Windows, a New England-based GLBT Newspaper

Congress is slated to take up the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) June 5. The pending vote shows that the Republican Party, despite its recent displays of ineptitude on everything from managing political leaks to convincing Congressmen not to take bribes (or at least to conceal them more skillfully), still knows how to play the gay marriage issue to its advantage. The Democrats, meanwhile, still — still — don’t know how to handle the question.

What’s so maddening about this isn’t just that we’re talking about the failure of both political parties to treat same-sex couples with dignity and respect. It’s that our desire to marry and raise families has been reduced to political games.

During an interview with Bay Windows about his decision to step down from his position as president of the Log Cabin Republicans, Patrick Guerriero recalls meeting President George W. Bush at a private White House Christmas party in 2003. As he was standing near the Christmas tree with the President and First Lady, Guerriero asked Bush not to support the FMA. The President thanked Guerriero for the work he did, but was non-committal on the FMA. “He didn’t give me a definitive answer,” Guerriero recalled. “I could tell there was a certain anxiety and my [sense] was this is not good.” At the same function, Guerriero talked about the FMA with then-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card and Bush advisor Karl Rove. “I got pretty strong indications it was going to be tough to stop it because of the polling on it,” Guerriero said. Later that same evening, Guerriero met privately with Rove and talked about the FMA. During that conversation, he said, he “realized this thing is just not going” away.

Guerriero was right. It wasn’t going to go away. And it hasn’t. That’s because Republicans rightly saw the issue of civil marriage rights for same-sex couples as a great wedge issue. Who cares if the only party members who actually believe that the marriages of same-sex couples are a threat to all that is good and great in this country are religious extremists completely out of step with mainstream America? Who cares if the First Lady says that the FMA shouldn’t “be used as a campaign tool,” as she said on Fox News Sunday May 14? Who cares if the party hacks who devised the 2004 presidential campaign’s gay baiting strategy believed it was wrong — as Mary Cheney confesses in her new book? Hey, it was just a game!

It’s too bad that our presumed political allies, the Democrats, can’t see beyond the game. The answer isn’t to respond to political lies with more lies, as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean did during a recent appearance on The 700 Club when he assured the mostly evangelical Christian audience that the Democratic Party platform states that “a marriage is between a man and a woman.” In fact, as Dean later clarified, the party platform from 2004 states that the Democratic Party supports the full inclusion “of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation” and that the issue of civil marriage rights should be left up to individual states to decide.

Why not take the high road in this debate? Maybe the best response to the Republicans’ continued use of gay marriage as a “campaign tool” as Laura Bush put it, is to talk about equality. After all, a majority of Americans — 54 percent according to a 2004 USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll — favor the legalization of civil unions for same-sex couples. And another poll from 2004 conducted by the Center for Information & Research on Civil Learning and Engagement found that young people aged 15 to 25 favor marriage rights for same-sex couples by a six-to-one margin.

Many Democrats believe that the only way to win national elections is to win the evangelical vote. Clinton won a majority of that vote in 1996. But why not woo such voters by appealing to their Christian beliefs rather than lying to them? The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson isn’t going to be won over. But your average Christian, who is not, in fact, filled with hatred for LGBT people, may be swayed by honest appeals to Christian values like grace, justice and love.

And why not expose the Republicans’ hypocrisy on this issue? Under Guerriero’s leadership, the Log Cabin Republicans did just that in 2004. They paid for political spots that were brilliant in their honesty: in a campaign against the FMA, the Log Cabin Republicans ran an ad featuring a clip of Vice President Dick Cheney from his 2000 debate with Sen. Joseph Lieberman in which Cheney spoke out against a federal ban on the marriages of same-sex couples.

The Democratic Party should have been running those ads. Of course, the Democrats seem to think that by ignoring the issue, it will go away. Or by parsing it out (supporting civil unions but not civil marriages) they’ll win over the ’phobes.

Civil marriage rights for same-sex couples are the civil rights issue of our generation. It’s not going away. One political party has struck electoral gold by using it as a wedge issue to scare Americans into thinking that once we let the gays marry, next thing you know, legalization of pedophilia, bestiality and polygamy is right around the corner. The other party suffers, with a few rare exceptions (the most obvious being Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold) from a failure of leadership, imagination and moral values.

Meanwhile, Congress is readying itself for another vote on the FMA. In the hopes of showing our leaders the right way on this issue, call your Senators and U.S. Representative as well as the leaders in both parties and tell them to leave our families alone.