Bush, apparently seeing the writing on the wall on his “run hard to the right since the middle ain’t listening” strategy of the past few months, has caved and openly endorsed allowing same sex unions. While I have a hard time believing it’s sincere, since it’s so wildly inconsistent with all sorts of Republican iniatives and Bush’s OWN FMA proposals, the fallout is this: both mainstream major candidates are now supporting civil unions for gays, in rhetoric at least. The position that such unions should be prevented is simply not represented by the two most powerful and influential figures in national politics at the moment.
Forget what this means to the political back and forth of the next few days. What this suggests is that civil rights being extended to gay couples has just gotten over a pretty important hump on popular acceptance. And given that I think social conservatives are completely correct: that civil unions for gays is basically marriage by another name that makes gay marriage inevitable and even likely in the near future.
Am I right? Is this the beginning of the end for the anti-gay marriage movement? They thought they had come so far: their amendments to ban rights for gay couples (under the guise of preventing gay “marriage”) were on the move in many states. And yet now, their biggest gun, their biggest leader, has essentially (though he doesn’t seem ready to draw the obvious conclusion) come out against them. Can they ever hope to recover without some sort of major political revolution/realignment in American society?
Bush is not leading people on this issue. The majority of Americans don’t support SSM, and having Bush come out one way or the other on the subject (and he hasn’t come out in favor of SSM anyway) really wouldn’t make much difference.
I think support for SSM by the majority of the population is just going to take time-- lots of time. I don’t honestly know a way to lead those opposed to it in a direction that they would support it. I’m not saying those passionate about the subject should give up, I just don’t see older folks coming around to accepting SSM.
There’s no way in hell I’d think this is anything but your basic “I’ll say anything, just re-elect me!!!” bullshit.
It’s pretty obvious he’s abandoning his conservative evangelical base. Or maybe it’s just that he figures he’s got them locked up, and now he can tack to the center for the first time in his campaign.
I don’t think it will matter too much in this election; it will come too late to convince many people of his sincerity (although there’s nowhere near enough time to slap a “flip-flop” tag on him), but I would hope the pro-gay marriage forces could take this statement in the upcoming months and run with it. It should help when civil unions comes up in a bill in some state legislature somewhere in the (hopefully) near-future.
When you get around to reading my OP, you’ll note that my point was not that Bush endorsed SSM, but he endorsed something that social conservatives, I think quite rightly, fear is the beginning of the end on SSM: a concession that basically makes SSM inevitable. To stop SSM from happening in the next decade or two, they really would have to solidify into law the inability for gay couples to get partnership rights akin to marriage. They would then have had to keep at least one of the major parties committed to trying to maintain that as a status quo long enough to truly stop the gay rights movement from making headway and exploiting the growing acceptance among younger people long enough to stop that trend.
But they just lost their biggest gun. If GW is re-elected, he’s on record as supporting Civil Unions for gays and opposing the very amendments they will need to win. If Kerry wins, same thing. They just got mighitly, mightily screwed over. This could be the beginning of the end for them.
Again, I’m not saying that SSM just now magically became legal. I’m saying that, even though it will take time to make it a reality, the basic battle looks to have been fought and lost: or at least betrayed. The argument that civil unions must be stopped in order to preserve marriage has just had the bottom fall out from underneath it.
If you think Bush’s statement on this subject will be in play after November 2, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an absurdly transparent ploy to stanch the deadly flow of moderate Republican voters fleeing anything to do with this Administration.
When you get around to reading my post, you’ll note that my point was not that your point was that Bush endorsed SSM.
Nope. Has there yet been an anti-SSM law put to the voters that got shot down? If there has been, I don’t know of it and it would be an extraordinary exception to the rule. The amendment deal was NEVER going to fly at the federal level. But it’s being fought successfully at the state level all the time. Efforts to deny gays access to civil unions also will not fly at the state level, either. There really isn’t a way to deny at least some level of civil union at the state level. Too much of it is just standard contractual agreement between two people about assets, power of attorney, etc.
When you get around to reading this post, you’ll note that my point was not that your point was that my point outright was that Bush endorsed SSM, but that your point was responding as if that was my point, which it was not. My point was that he came out in opposition to what I and most social conservatives believe is the only real way to win the battle against inevtiable SSM. And that not having EITHER major candidate be on their side is a deadly blow, especially given that Bush is probably the most conservative face of the nationally electable half of the GOP. They need a committed national leader to help them: not someone who is merely not against them, but who is WITH them. And Bush basically just took himself out of that game in any serious sense. The social conservatives won’t have another chance to get a President who is on actively their side until 2008, and by then it may be too late.
So, “nope” means “yeah, basically, you’re right”??? My whole point rests on the idea that fighting official Civil Unions is an uphill battle for which at least one of the major “sides” must have their whole heart in. But now both sides have, as their current head representatives, guys that are opposed to those amendments. I don’t see how this can be seen as anything less than a MAJOR gut punch to the social conservatives in their effort to try and save society from the creeping eventuality of gay marriages. They’ll pass amendments in some places (though they may lose in Michigan), but ultimately the tide will have already turned before they can truly solidify and be effective. The nation is ALREADY heading in the direction of supporting gay unions because of the greater and greater acceptance of gay couples among the younger generations. Stopping that tide takes a national leader of Bush’s weight-class, and now they’ve lost that.
Well, its entirely possible, is it not, that GeeDubya has re-examined the issue, in the light of his Christian compassion and informed by his personal interaction with gay persons, and has realized the error of his ways and taken a courageous step to repudiate the harsh and heartless dogma of the extremist wing of…
But you haven’t made any arguments that address my actual case. You act as if my case were “so, gay marriage’s now?” My case is “so, can the anti-gay marriage movement survive this?” Your only actual arguments simply repeat the idea that gay marriage is not a majority opinion at present and conservatives can still pass some laws that try to stop the gay unions that slip us down the slipperly slope. But this is mostly irrelevant to what I’ve been saying. My whole discussion has been about the overall strategy: can they turn back the trend that looks to make gay marriage ultimately inevitable within a generation or two? My argument: no, not without a major Presidential-level advocate who is at least marginally on their side in the fight against civil unions. There was a time when interracial marriage was a minority opinion (but the more open attitudes of the younger generation looked to change that trend, just like now), but once the major politicians could no longer come out openly against it, it was only a matter of time. It’s was a major milestone in that case, and I think it is in this one too. In fact, I doubt we’ll ever see another President that is not at least for gay civil unions unless there is some really drastic revolution in American society on the level of the radical uprisings in Iran… something I just don’t see happening in America.
I said in my first post that I thought SSM would be legal in a generation or two. Maybe I wasn’t crystal clear, but that is what I meant when I talked about the older folks being the limmiting factor.
I just think that the civil union battle has nothing to do with SSM. It was a lost cause from the very beginning. If you look at the polls now, most people are already OK with civil unions (even though I bet not many folks actually know where they would draw the line between civil union benefits and marriage benefits). Even if we accept Bush’s recent comments at face value, he’s a **follower **on the civil unions issue, not a leader.
Once the pendulum swings to a certain point, there will be no going back. Those opposed to letting gays marry will become more and more marginalized. Just like segregationists eventually became marginalized in the South once they lost their stronghold. I believe there will come a point within my lifetime they will be regarded just the same as racists are now.
I agree. It’s just a question of how long it’s going to take for the pendulum to swing. What’s interesting is that we’ve had SSM in MA for 5 months now, and it’s just no big deal. Yet there are, IIRC, 12 states with SSM amendment issues or laws on the ballot next month. We’ll see how many of those pass, but the odds are most if not all will. I expect it will be a very, very long time before we see SSM legal in all 50 states even if we see it legal in most states within the next 20 years.
Ok. The last point point I just had to do anyway because I love convolution.
But that’s the problem: yes, it’s a losing cause, and that losing cause makes anti-SSM a loser as well. They know they’re on the ropes. But many social conservatives figured that by using the public distaste for SSM, they could effectively stop the progress of civil unions, tying them together. With a national leader like Bush backing that confusion, they might have been able to really make civil unions difficult. The FMA amendment would first fail, and then as a “compromise” they could get some of what they needed to block civil unions from functioning under the guise of legislating against gay marriage. But Bush has undercut that connection.
Which again, is sort of my point: the anti-civil unions people HAVE no national leader. They thought they might. They thought they had hope. And it was dashed. They are hopping mad about it too. Even if Bush quietly was for civil unions all along, at least he had, from their perspective, the good sense not to spell it out while they tried to mix anti-Civil Union law with anti-SSM law. But they just got knifed in the back, big time.
Actually, Bush has endorsed same-sex civil unions for at least two years now. This is not a flip-flop; this is just articulating the part of his position that is always drowned out by people focusing on his “No gay marriage!” position.
You may be reading too much into his qualifiers surrounding his anti-gay-marriage amendment proposal that the states should be allowed to create other institutions. That falls well short of endorsing them.
Unless you maybe have one of them “cite” thingies handy, John?
A cite for what? I specifically said that Bush’s stance on this issue is irrelevant as he’s not leading the cause. I never said anything about what he endorsed or didn’t endorse. People who are anti-SSM don’t need Bush to tell them to hold that stance. anti-SSM has been the norm in the US before Bush entered the political arena, and it will most likely be the norm after he leaves.