Andrew Sullivan: Never say gay: Bush plays a subtle vote card

The Sunday Times ^ | July 18, 2004 | Andrew Sullivan

[megatherium]

If memory serves, exit polling indicated that 70% of gays and lesbians voted for Gore in 2000.

[George W. Bush]

...what if there are decreasing numbers of genuine swing voters in the middle? That certainly seems to be the case in this campaign.

It's because 9/11 and the Iraq war polarized the voters many months before they would normally have made such choices in a peacetime election.

Karl Rove, his political guru, has been obsessed these past 3½ years that 4m evangelical voters did not show up to the polls in 2000. With them, Bush might have won some critical states and might not have had to endure the Florida nightmare.

Rove should make up his mind. Is is 3 million or 4 million?

The Republican leadership cleared the schedule of other less important matters — such as passing a budget — in favour of an emotional debate about values. All of this was not because they believed that the amendment would pass but because they wanted to find an issue to rev up their base with as much fervour as Kerry’s is mobilised against Bush.

A dog-and-pony show. Get the rubes to vote for something you have no intention of passing and which you had plenty of chances to pass much earlier if you were actually sincere. As far as promises of smaller government and restrained spending and conservative justices in the second Bush term (as long as you just vote GOP again!), it's much the same. Vote for us again and we'll finally give you that which we refused to deliver even while holding all three elected branches.

Bah. They think we're fools.

The base mobilisation has only just begun. Republican groups in several swing states are organising their own anti-gay marriage amendments to their state constitutions, and if the measures are on the ballot this autumn they will help to stoke a big turnout of fundamentalist voters.

More Rovian machinations. The use of state party proxies is some nice window-dressing. Watch which states they use this strategy in. It will just happen to be those crucial swing states. The Supreme Court can later overrule them all in a single stroke.

So he has put up speakers at the convention who are uniformly social liberals: Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, George Pataki, governor of New York, and Rudy Giuliani, another liberal Republican. But beneath the surface the “values” campaign is in full swing — especially in local media markets. If the distinction between a debate about values and a homophobic campaign gets a little blurry, then that’s all part of the plan, too.

This schizophrenic all-things-to-all-people approach is dangerous.

To judge the true intentions of the party, we have to take it at face vaule: social liberalism and GOP federal pork is the goal. But social/fiscal conservatives are the backstairs mistress who gets a little romance behind the scenes when they need her favors.

[George W. Bush]

Obligatory link to Sullivan's bugchasing bareback websites (archived):

Sullivan exposed

Warning: strong sexual content

[ECM]

Not true: he did say specifically that but there's no way I'm slogging through his blog to find those posts--if you're that interested in it, have at it. I stand by what I said regardless of what you might think.

[xm177e2]

there's no way I'm slogging through his blog to find those posts--if you're that interested in it, have at it

How can I "prove" he never said something?

You're not going to find any comments by Sullivan suggesting that when people aren't allowed to have sex they have sex with children.

In fact, there are priests who break their vows of celibacy and have sex with adults. That's what you might expect to happen if a priest was hard-up in a serious way and was ready to break his vows--not an attack on a child.

[ECM]

I didn't say anything about attacking children--the priestly abuse scandal, by and large, revolves around post-pubescent 'children', i.e. teens, thereby making the priests in question pedarasts and not pedophiles. And as the vast majority of the abused were male...well, you can figure out the rest.

And that is why Sullivan got himself into a lather about it: he knows full well that there is a not insignifigant portion of the homosexual cultre oriented towards such behavior, and attempting to deflect what it actually was towards the 'unnatural' state of celibacy is extremely dishonest.

In any event, like I said, the posts are there if you wish to go back and find them--I, however, have no interest in digging through his archives when I could be doing something a bit more productive.