Posted on 02/14/2004 1:43:51 PM PST by gawd
BOSTON - In the battle over same-sex marriage, liberals have been front and center, pushing to give gays and lesbians the right to wed.
But there is at least a small block of conservatives who are on the same page, often for different reasons: They're loath to tinker with a constitution, for one, or they want to see more people — gay or straight — make commitments.
The stance is a departure from that of most conservatives, a division that supporters of gay marriage hope to exploit.
"I don't see the response to gay marriage as unified at all on the conservative side," said Glenn H. Reynolds, a supporter of gay marriage rights and publisher of the generally conservative blog Instapundit.com.
Most recent polls have shown fairly wide skepticism about gay marriage. Democrats are nearly evenly split on the matter, while most Republicans oppose it.
That split was evident this past week in the Massachusetts Legislature when three proposed amendments to the state constitution that would have banned gay marriage lost by a handful of votes each time. (Each amendment also would have allowed civil unions in some form.)
After two days of intense debate that went well into the evening, legislators failed to reach a consensus and decided to recess until next month.
If lawmakers pass such a constitutional amendment this year, it would put it on course to end up on the ballot in November 2006 — two years after court-ordered weddings are to begin taking place in the state.
A vocal contingent of conservatives are furious that activist judges have forced a revision of the law, and adamant that the millenia-old institution of marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples.
Gay marriage would not be "the end of civilization," said David Horowitz, a prominent conservative who once opposed a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage but has changed his mind in light of the Massachusetts decision. "But I am an opponent of judicial tyranny. And I think there's a lot of conservatives like me."
But while many conservatives oppose activist judges, they also resist tinkering with the state and federal constitutions. On states-rights grounds, prominent right-leaning columnists like George Will have opposed a proposed federal amendment, as have key lawmakers who otherwise oppose gay marriage, like Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga.
A few conservative commentators have articulated a case that goes beyond opposing a constitutional amendment, and actually support gay marriage.
"The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments," David Brooks wrote recently in The New York Times, praising the virtues of fidelity. "We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage."
Brooks has been joined by a few fellow pundits on the right, notably Andrew Sullivan, and a handful of libertarian bloggers who say the government has no place meddling in the relationships of its citizens.
Sensing chinks in the armor, gay-rights activists are appealing to family values or a hands-off approach to the Constitution.
The gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign has touted the virtues of marriage both for gay families and America in ads that ran in establishment newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
But in the ads it ran in places like Omaha, Neb., and Indianapolis, Human Rights Campaign took a different tack, appealing to conservatives not to support a federal amendment banning same-sex marriage. In one, an elderly woman stares into the camera and says "I'm pretty conservative, but I can't support amending the constitution over this."
Seth Kilbourn, HRC's national field director, said his group believes the country's conservative leadership is split on gay marriage. His group is trumpeting the message that amending the constitution to discriminate is wrong.
"Under that message falls the conservative argument: You don't use the constitution to resolve these kinds of social debates," Kilbourn said.
The Log Cabin Republicans (news - web sites), a group of gay Republicans, is also focusing on the constitutional argument.
"We have found some conservative Republicans and a handful of senators, Democrats and Republicans, who are probably never going to be with us on equality but would probably cut their arm off before they'd mess with the constitution," said Mark Mead, the group's political director.
Social conservatives say such arguments betray the cause.
Genevieve Wood, vice president of communications for the Family Research Council, accuses Brooks and others of failing to be "true conservatives" when it comes to gay marriage.
While social conservatives and libertarians "agree on lower taxes, less government involvement," she said, "when it comes to redefining the family, we don't think that's for government to do."
At the beginning of the republic, the U.S. Constitution had no jurisdiction with the boundaries of a sovereign state.
It was only after the ratification of the 14th amendment that the U.S. Constitution had jurisdiction within the boundaries of state.
The founding father's would have supported the states deciding on their own whether to acknowledge homosexual unions or marriages. Some states would have sanctioned it, others would have not. Just like slavery.
Are sure you should have not put this remark in quotations?
I would have attributed it to Hillary Clinton, the socialist/communist.
Reread my post about being inconsistent in your support of the Bill of Rights.
We are not a democracy. The "group" does not deny or disparage inalienable rights. Rights are not to be negotiated in the political arena.
Anything to the contrary is tyranny of the majority.
Not specifically. However, they wrote it with the knowledge that their list of rights was incomplete, in order to protect rights that they had not thought to enumerate.
Marriage, in a legal sense, is nothing more than a legal contract to share assets and responsibilities within an household. The right of consenting adults, in any combination, to enter such a contract should be protected.
The problem is that we've conflated an economic agreement with emotional commitment and sexual cohabitation. The wisest course, IMO, would be to strip the term "marriage" completely out the legal code and replace it with a term like "civil union" or "joint household agreement."
Whether homosexuals in such a shared household should be considered married, should be left to individual belief and societal consensus.
bravo, you've said it better than I could. I agree.
Pardon me, I must have missed the election that was held to determine who could define who is and is not a conservative. Congratulations on your apparent victory.
Here's a few reasons as to why some conservatives might not be actively resisting gay marriage:
1) That mucking about with the Constitution thing, heavily discussed on other threads, so I'll leave it alone for now.
2) Sizing up the battle, and deciding that the time to have stopped gay marriage with an amendment was during the Reagan or first Bush administrations. Relying on a DOMA signed by Clinton, who promised his friends that it wouldn't mean squat to a SCOTUS that had Ginsburg and Breyer on it, as well as Souter, Kennedy and Stevens, plus whoever he had the chance to appoint in a second term, was not enough. No serious challenge to civil union was mounted after Vermont, and while the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court might have surprised some people, it was bound to happen eventually anyway. I don't remember GWB making it a campaign issue, and he certainly didn't rush to put an FMA into law either after he assumed office, or after 9/11, when he was politically stronger.
What resources do we really want to throw into this battle, anyway? It's probably not worth giving up tax cuts, spending increases, or whatever else it would take to add Rat votes to get to a two-thirds majority to move this out of the Congress. Add in the horse trading it would take in many states, and the cost of this becomes enormous, with only thirteen states being able to make it all for naught.
3.) A general unease that the mushy middle has on the subject of gay marriage could resonate with votes in the fall. I'm presuming that MA will do nothing when they get back to work on this in March, after two days of being absolutely unable to come up with an amendment this last week. If, indeed, MA voters are going to punish their legislature for allowing gay marriage to go absolutely unchallenged, they might make MA a more Republican state.
This could also happen throughout the country, as well. It's been pointed out that this will be a big liability for Kerry, who at this point in time, is still the presumptive Rat nominee, and even if he isn't, the actual nominee will not have views anywhere to the right of Kerry on this subject. Why not let the left defend it, while Republicans talk about national defense, and when asked about gay marriage, simply say, we need more people in our party to have a hope of challenging it?
4) There's the freedom issue here, too. You can label all conservatives who don't share your views on homosexuality as libertarians, but it doesn't change the fact that there are people who believe in small government, lower taxes, a strong military, and the right of the people to bear arms, who are not uncomfortable with gay marriage. They know gay people who are not the nasties that ride on floats in gay pride parades, and while they decry promiscuity in both hetero and homosexual relationships, they want to lend their approval for fidelity in the people who society has marginalized. They probably know some gays who share their beliefs in all of the above normally conservative views, who would vote Republican if the gay issues that the Rats support were off the table. I'm pretty sure that the rabidly anti-gay folks here find that hard to believe, but if they had any associates who were gay, those associates would not let them know about it.
5) Perhaps you disagree, but it is not necessary to be a Christian, or an Orthodox Jew to be a conservative. Unencumbered by a strict religious view against homosexuality, these conservatives fear the establishment of a theocracy, or at least having the Republican Party being viewed as wanting to establish theocracy.
In five years, I assure you, we'll all have moved on from this, some of us are just ready to do it now.
Misleading headline for sure. Check out this quote:
The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments," David Brooks wrote recently in The New York Times, praising the virtues of fidelity. "We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage."
Brooks has been joined by a few fellow pundits on the right, notably Andrew Sullivan, and a handful of libertarian bloggers who say the government has no place meddling in the relationships of its citizens.
They call Brooks and Andrew Sullivan CONSERVATIVES????
If anyone wants on or off this ping list (which I predict will become stratospheric next week) let me know.
Yes there are. There are many types of conservatives out there. A very large percentage are only fiscally conservative and are socially liberal.
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