Daughter Speculates on Ronald Reagan’s Gay-Rights Views

New York Times ^ | 04/04/2013 | SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

[SeekAndFind]

As Republican politicians wrestle with same-sex marriage, the daughter of a party icon — former President Ronald Reagan — said in an interview this week that she believes her father would have “been puzzled” by the political fuss and would have supported marriage for gay people.

Patti Davis, a Los Angeles writer and the onetime rebellious daughter of Reagan and his second wife, Nancy, said in a telephone interview that she never discussed same-sex marriage with the former president, who died in 2004 just as it was emerging as a political issue.

But Ms. Davis, now 60, offered several reasons her father, who would have been 102 this year, would have bucked his party on the issue: his distaste for government intrusion into private lives, his Hollywood acting career and close friendship with a lesbian couple who once cared for Ms. Davis and her younger brother Ron while their parents were on a Hawaiian vacation — and slept in the Reagans’ king-size bed.

“I grew up in this era where your parents’ friends were all called aunt and uncle,” Ms. Davis said. “And then I had an aunt and an aunt. We saw them on holidays and other times.” She added, “We never talked about it, but I just understood that they were a couple.”

Once when she and her father were watching a Rock Hudson movie, Ms. Davis said, she remarked that the actor “looked weird” kissing his female co-star. She said her father explained that Mr. Hudson “would rather be kissing a man,” and conveyed, without using the words homosexual or gay, the idea that “some men are born wanting to love another man.” Years later, in 1985, Mr. Hudson died of AIDS.

[justiceseeker93]

Morgan, who’s Catholic, said he understands the religious argument against same-sex marriage, but added that he believes it’s the same argument that was used to prohibit interracial marriage. He then noted the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia in which the court ruled that states’ laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Memo to Morgan: (1) One can be an atheist and object to gay marriage on social and economic grounds only. (2) You don't understand the meaning of the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was part of a post-Civil War amendment designed specifically to equalize the legal status of newly freed black slaves with that of unenslaved Americans. It was extended in subsequent court rulings to apply to other racial and ethnic groups as well. So the "equal protection" clause applied appropriately in the Loving case (racial differences among persons engaging in the same behavior: heterosexual marriage) but it never has applied to the equalization under law of individuals' behavioral differences. There lies the obvious distinction between the two.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for sharing your insights, dear justiceseeker93!