The Dish

I’m posting because I’ve now received over a thousand. And because as a document of the initial response to the president’s shocking embrace of discrimination in the Constitution, they’re worth recording. Most are appalled, angry, hurt, betrayed. Some, obviously, are not. Here’s a selection of the more recent ones:

“I can feel your depression through the computer monitor, but if it makes you feel any better, I’ve been married to my wife for 26 years, and let me tell you something, you ain’t missing a goddamn thing.”

“I am (or, I never thought I’d say it, was?) a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who (much like you) has spent the last two years proselytizing my liberal friends for GW. I am also a woman who has been in a committed same-sex relationship for 25 years. I feel like I was body-slammed today. What a quandary: I don’t know for sure that the Dems will be worse in the war on terror, but I do now know for sure the Republicans will be worse in protecting my equal rights. This is just a depressing day.”

“I cannot express more eloquently than you already have my disgust with President Bush’s support of the Federal Marriage Ammendment. I feel betrayed. I have always felt more comfortable with the Republican take on issues, even though I knew that Democrats tend to be better on gay issues. Until today, though, I found defense and fiscal issues more important than gay issues. Bush’s support of the FMA trumps everything else. I now have no choice but to vote for whichever Democrat wins the nomination. I blame Bush for stealing the party that I called home. I cannot foresee when next I’ll vote for another Republican.”

“I would rather not amend the Constitution as President Bush proposes. In an ideal world, I don’t think the Constitution was really meant to prescribe the definition of marriage.
However, those of us who oppose so-called “gay marriage” feel we have no options left.
The rogue judges in Massachusetts and the arrogant, law-breaking mayor of San Francisco make it clear that same-sex “marriage” advocates will stop at nothing to impose their perversity on America.
Your hunger for anal intercourse and official state affirmation of it — even to the point of deeming your sexual behavior a reason to “marry”! — trumps your respect for fundamental American values. Your perverse sexual ethics have led inevitably to perverse and destructive political ethics.
All of this has led me to conclude that you and your sodomy-loving cohorts are totalitarians, plain and simple.
And you must be stopped.
If that takes a Constitutional amendment, so be it. It’s regrettable, but that’s the way it goes.”

The latest polling from Annenberg’s Public Policy Center on the religious right amendment to the Constitution to ban marriage for gays shows that the public opposes the amendment 48 to 41 percent. The highest opposition is in the West and Northeast but the Midwest opposes it by 47 to 41 percent. The under 30s oppose it by 58 percent to 30 percent. Only those over 65 support it. And that’s despite majorities against marriage rights for gays in general. Bush has therefore decided to move the marriage issue from a context in which he gets majority support to a position where he splits the country down the middle. More genius from Karl Rove. Rove has now succeeded in ensuring that almost no gay people will vote for or support the Republican party for a generation. And it was completely avoidable.

“I don’t quite know what to say. I’m a 21 year old gay student at Wesleyan University. I have no affinity for President Bush. I have little respect for him. I knew, on an intellectual level, that he might eventually support this amendment. But to hear him say it aloud – I wasn’t prepared for the emotional response I would have … this is truly, truly devastating. Truly devastating.”

“While it may mean little in the face of the hatred and discrimination expressed by our nation’s leader today, I want you to know you have my wholehearted support. How can it be that two people expressing their love for each other and asking society to recognize that love be a bad thing? How can a couple choosing to spend their life together in a bond of love possibly harm our society? It is beyond my apparently meager comprehension to anticipate the consequences that allowing gay marriage will bear. All I can anticipate is love and acceptance.
It shouldn’t be an important fact, but I am straight. One of my close friends is gay. I’ve watched him experience heartbreak, hope and love over the last few years. His emotions are no less real than mine. His love is given as truly as mine is. Why should we not recognize this? And how dare we amend a document that gives hope and freedom to the world to deny hope and freedom to a group of our own citizens?
It offends me as a straight man, as an American citizen, but more importantly as a human being who believes that each one of us deserves equal dignity, that our president seeks to cloak a beacon of liberty with a veil of intolerance and discrimination. I only wish that President Bush would have turned to the words of a great Republican president and heeded the better angels of his nature to oppose this amendment. It saddens me that his actions do not come as a surprise.”

“What a strange juxtaposition, almost surreal. Today we get “The Passion of Christ” delivered. A bloody, gory, historically inaccurate film sure to stoke religious fundamentalism in America, ironically the same folks who refuse to accept modern science and any notion that homosexuality is anything but a behavioral choice. We get Bush calling for a Constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage. It does not outlaw no-fault divorce, or cheap 5 minute weddings performed by Elvis in Las Vegas. Instead it is a cheap political exploitation, but unlike most others (from both sides of the isle) would attempt to enshrine in the Constitution religious fundamentalism. And finally, we get two new Al Qaeda tapes. How ironic that those fundamentalists in the Arab world may have a more positive view of America because its President will now push to permanently stigmatize gays as inferior and not worthy of full citizenry? Those who really believe in the ideals of this country must now speak up.”

“Islamists want to keep human understanding and progress trapped in the 8th Century. Keeping it trapped in the 20th is surely just as awful. History will not look kindly on George W. Bush, even if his foreign policy ends up being what saves the future. We will take that for granted. But future generations will look back and see how he demanded the Constitution’s alteration to discriminate against a minority group. This is what he will be remembered for. This will be his legacy.”

“Log Cabin Republicans are more determined than ever to fight the anti-family Constitutional amendment with all our resources,” said Log Cabin Executive Director Patrick Guerriero. “Writing discrimination into our Constitution violates conservative and Republican principles. This amendment would not strengthen marriage – it would weaken our nation. As conservative Republicans, we are outraged that any Republican – particularly the leader of our party and this nation – would support any effort to use our sacred United States Constitution as a way of scoring political points in an election year.”

HEADS UP: Tonight, I’ll be on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings; and on CNN’s Newsnight with Aaron Brown.

More emails. Hundreds and hundreds of them. The theme is pretty consistent. Here’s one:

“This issue goes so far beyond politics, for many of us it is about fundamental fairness, compassion and even patriotism. I love my country, and was saddened as the president spoke this morning. This isn’t a liberal or conservative issue. It’s about our basic humanity, or lack thereof. Making political hay at the expense of both the Constitution and the Gay community smacks of Willy Horton, and is simply dangerous and wrong. People will be hurt, lives may be lost, and everyone loses with tactics of this sort. I cannot speak for all Americans, but there are millions of liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Greens etc. who will stand with you on this issue. I get so angry when GWB speaks of compassion, to hell with compassion, All Americans deserve their place at the table with the rest of us, fully vested citizens of this country with no asterisk, hyphen or apologies required. I often find myself at odds with your conclusions on the issues, but I have respect for your thoughtfulness, and your lack of mean-spirited acerbity so common today.”

I wonder if the Bush administration even thought about how mean-spirited this was going to appear. And how nakedly political. Some journalists are reporting that White House sources are telling them that they do not expect this to pass but they need to fire up their base. They’d go this far for purely political reasons? I guess I really was naive.

DEFENDING MARRIAGE: “I just finished reading your recent posts and I felt compelled to write you and just simply say thank you.
Not that it matters, but I’m not gay. I am, however, recently and happily married. (In fact, it’s my husband who follows your daily blog and sent me your “Why The M Word Matters To Me” article last week.) I LOVE being married. It’s fulfilled a part of me that I never knew could be fulfilled. And it’s funny how when you suddenly have a state certified document that says you’re together, people treat you differently. They take you more seriously. You suddenly become “real and true” in the eyes of your family and even strangers. And I think that’s why now more than ever, I’ve been trying to find ways to express my outrage that there are people who don’t believe EVERYONE should have the right to do this. I just finished reading your recent posts in response to President Bush’s announcement and I just felt I had to tell you that I not only agree with you, but I respect what you’re doing so much.
I also grew up Catholic… in a large, close knit Irish Catholic family as a matter of fact. And my cousin happens to be gay. I think many in my family thought for years that he was and at least with me, it was painful to know he felt he had to keep it a secret. Fortunately, my family embraced him with love and support when he came out a couple of years ago. Even better, when he brought home his first boyfriend. That article really resonated with me… not to be overly dramatic but it brought me to tears. My cousin and I are extremely close and the thought that one day he can’t just go out and get married when he wants to is depressing and utterly frustrating. He is a wonderful, beautiful person who should have the RIGHT to share his life with whomever he chooses. Actually, even if he were a terrible person he should still have that RIGHT. Everyone should.”

INNER CONFLICTS: “First off, I am sorry for the president’s recent comments. I can only imagine how crushing they must be for someone of your preference and integrity. I, like many other Americans (perhaps even you) are now left with several inner conflicts regarding the upcoming election. I am a conservative who, though angry at the president for his fiscal recklessness, is incredibly proud of this president in regard to the war on terror. And now this. I have no doubt in my mind that there are few men in this nation (much less politics) who would be able to conduct the war on terror in the fashion (one of principled war rather than law enforcement) and with the bravery that this president has done. As you said, this is one of the great benefits of a president who can make value judgments between good and evil so clearly. But this amendment issue has left me, for the first time, questioning where he draws those lines and the ease with which he does so. I will still vote for Bush in November, but not with the same pride with which I would have done so just one day ago. I will vote for him out of fear – not any fear instilled by the GOP or campaign rhetoric, but fear of a very real threat to liberty in this world. The stakes are too high, and, unfortunately, I am now stuck with no choice but to eat crow at home for the sake of my own protection from the fanatical acts of a few foreigners.”

OFF THE WAGON: “I am an independent voter who was supporting Bush for re-election, primarily due to his actions in the war on terror. But no longer. His disgraceful support for altering the nation’s constitution, in order to enshrine bigotry, division and scorn is the last straw. I was willing to overlook so many of his deficiencies: fiscal irresponsibilty, enlarging the size and scope of the federal government, inability to communicate effectively, etc., due to his determined pursuit of those terrorists and fanatics attempting to harm America and the West. However, I am now going to support the Democratic nominee and rely on the public to vociferously support and demand that a newly-elected Democratic president continue the war on terror. I do not believe the public will allow a Democratic president to be soft on the terror war. Simply, I can no longer in good conscience support President Bush. He has gone too far.”

IN SHOCK: “I am just in shock and sick to my stomach right now. I won’t pretend that I was ever a Bush supporter, but I always felt willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on certain issues, to give credit where credit was due on others. And even though he has been threatening to support this, I guess I just never believed that he really would. But when I heard him support this amendment, I truly felt a sense of despair that I can’t quite express. I pray that this act of hate unites gays, lesbians, and other people of conscience against this administration; as a percentage of the population, I think we must outnumber the extremists on the religious right who have been demanding that Bush support this amendment in exchange for their continued support. I really do believe that, over time, right triumphs over wrong in America.”

TWO BY FOUR: “Seriously, when they have to hit you with the speech equivalent of a two by four to get your attention as to how they feel about you, you might want to rethink your party affiliation.”

OUTTA HERE: “Simply put, if the United States Constitution were amended to define marriage as between a man and a woman, whatever its form, I would leave the country. I just couldn’t stay…just couldn’t.”

TIME TO UNITE: “I’ve always tried very hard not to criticize gays who support Bush because I think that we need to try and understand the reasons why people have certain opinions rather than to just criticize them immediately. I think that gays are some of the most intolerant people when it comes to politics, but Bush has just today made this intolerance something that is clearly justified. As you have pointed out so well on your site, it is now impossible for a gay person to support this President or even to feel that the President does not actively discriminate against you personally. He’s made the decision easy this year, I will vote for the most likely person to defeat him, regardless of the state of affairs at the election. I hope that gay people can make this a positive rather than a negative and work together to show Bush he cannot discriminate against Americans openly and get a pass. We need to all forget about our past opinions and drop any desire to say “I told you so” to the millions of gay Americans who have supported Bush. I know I will.”

WRONG, ANDREW: “President Bush didn’t ‘declare war’ on the civil rights of homosexuals; left-wing activist judges, mayors, city bureaucrats and the gay movement have declared war on the rule of law and the institution of marriage. President Bush has merely responded to what others have started. The battle is now joined and I believe that the overwhelming majority of the country will be in the President’s army, as you’ll soon find out.”

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens – and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.

NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States – or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations – and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He’s a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans – and their families and their friends – his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

British intellectual David Goodhart is worrying that left-liberal commitment to a large, distributive welfare state is threatened by cultural and ethnic diversity. He’s responding to David Willetts’ acute insight that the current Euro-left is pinned on a bit of a contradiction:

It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform, he said: “The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”

That’s why welfare reform actually helped the American welfare state. And why affirmative action is such a corrosive feature on our society: it’s what happens when big government merges with group rights in a society that is too heterogeneous to find real common ground. Maybe the marriage debate is a part of this as well. Our society is now astonishingly diverse in terms of different kinds of families. From two-income childless yuppies to arranged Muslim marriages to lesbians with kids to seniors on their second marriage to suburban single dads and more traditional nuclear families: can we feel a bond to each of these arrangements as if they were our own? My own view is that radical cultural diversity can only be managed in the long run by ratcheting back what the government can do, by limiting its moral authority, by restricting its distributive take. (So marriage becomes less explicitly religious as a social institution and more explicitly civil. At least that’s the limited government argument of “Virtually Normal.”) But we are currently expanding government and demanding a more coherent “politics of meaning,” even while cultural and moral diversity explodes. Something has gotta give.

“It bothers and worries me to see how enamored you have become of John Edwards’ candidacy. I live in North Carolina, and having witnessed his rapid rise to national prominence I feel I should hold up a sign that says, “Warning, Turn Back NOW!” Edwards does have skill and charisma, but his primary skill is the ability to convince a jury (and an electorate) that he has substance. There is no evidence that he knows how to govern. He has never done it, at any level.
And remember, Edwards has also never been re-elected to any political office, has never been reaffirmed at the polls by those he represents. There are plenty of Carolinians who are convinced he decided to run for President only because he would be unlikely to be re-elected as Senator based on his performance in office so far. He began running for President less than half way through his first term in Washington, and consequently has done nothing for his constituents, unless one considers his actual constituency to be the trial lawyers lobby and those few who had the opportunity to give him 35% of the proceeds of their litigation.
For all the concern about other politicians’ ties to ‘special interests’, here we have a candidate who is financed by and is running for the trial lawyers, the richest and most entrenched special interest of all. It boggles the mind to realize that someone with no experience in government, no demonstrated understanding of international relations and no meaningful record in domestic affairs is being touted so highly for the most important job in the world, simply because he is a pretty face with the backing of serious money. And because he is not Kerry, Dean, or a Republican.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

BETTER: Bush’s opening campaign salvo was a lot better than his recent performances. His best lines were the following:

“The other party’s nomination battle is still playing out. The candidates are an interesting group with diverse opinions: for tax cuts and against them; for NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and against NAFTA; for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act; in favor of liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that’s just one senator from Massachusetts.”

Far more effective to target Kerry’s fundamental weakness – that he has said everything and anything over the years – than to engage in the culture war of attrition over Vietnam. But Bush’s attempts to talk about himself as a president expanding choice and limiting government just don’t ring true. You cannot expand government and increase public debt at the rate Bush has and then turn around and say that you’re a small government conservative. You cannot ignore the future fiscal crisis that will come when the boomers retire and say the following: “It’s the President’s job to confront problems, not to pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.” On the most basic issue of the government’s solvency, this president has indeed passed on huge and mounting problems to the next generation. In this respect, he is, sad to say, the living refutation of the “responsibility society” he says he believes in. I wonder if this has even occurred to him.

And Ponnuru taketh away. Ramesh Ponnuru, whose task it is to explain the religious right amendment to the constitution, suggests that the wording of the amendment should excise two words – “state or” – from the current wording. He wants to rebut the notion that the amendment would forbid state courts from enforcing state laws that provide for civil unions. But at the same time, he confirms that two critical authors of the amendment, Robbie George and Gerald Bradley, believe that the first sentence of the amendment bans civil unions that are the equivalent of marriage as well. They’re not interested in merely retaining the word “marriage” for heterosexuals. They want to retain the legal incidents of marriage for heterosexuals only as well. That in itself is evidence that the intent of some authors of this amendment is to strip gay couples everywhere of any protections of the kind that marriage now provides straights. And anti-gay state courts could easily use this confusing and ambiguous amendment, if it passes, to keep gay couples from any civil protections at all. But maybe I’m confused. So here’s a simple question for Ramesh. As he understands it, would the amendment as currently written, void Vermont’s civil unions? The unions were passed by the legislature, but only because the court insisted. Ditto in Massachusetts, if civil unions are enacted there. Would they be abolished under the FMA? Perhaps if we get specific, we’ll find out what this amendment would really mean. For further comment on Ponnuru’s apologetics, check out Eugene Volokh and Jacob Levy.