A defining moment for McCain?

[jducoeur]

In the wake of CA's court decision to legalize same-sex marriage, it looks to me like the issue is at a crisis point. How it plays out is going to depend *very* much on McCain -- and how he treats it will tell us a lot about him.

Yes, we've been down this road before. But let's get real: everyone in the country knows about the Massachusetts Reality Warp (except maybe the people in this state, many of whom don't seem to understand just how weird a place this is). So when MA legalized gay marriage, it raised quite a hubbub, but in a certain sense it wasn't a threat -- most people could take say, "Oh, that's just that strange liberal state", and figure that it wouldn't happen anywhere else.

But this time it's California. Still pretty liberal, but quite a bit more divided and representative of the country -- this is the state that brought us Ronald Reagan, after all. It's the biggest and richest state in the country, and it tends to be a long-term bellwether. So when *they* legalize it, both sides know that the ball is gaining momentum. I think most people are going to have the sense -- the quite accurate sense, I should add -- that if the gay-marriage movement isn't stopped within the next five years, it'll pretty much be unstoppable, since the demographic trends are on its side.

So the religious right has only one tactic that makes any real sense: put pressure on McCain to change his stance, and support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The excuse they will use is that it's fighting "activist judges", who are perverting the country's morals. Their claim will be that, by turning this Presidential election into a referendum about holding a referendum, they will be able to rally the right once more, and take the White House.

What will McCain do, if the conservatives push this? He's on the record as being against an amendment -- indeed, his public position is much like that of both Democrats, and if they all keep to their positions the issue will be relatively muted. (Which, mind, is the best likely outcome. We *will* win this, so long as we play the long game, winning victories state by state. The only chance of real defeat is if the conservatives can rally strongly enough to get and win a constitutional amendment now, which would likely set the whole thing back by decades.) Oh, sure -- there will be the battle over who gets to appoint the Supreme Court, which is somewhat relevant. But that just doesn't inspire the kind of fervor that an amendment could, especially since the conservatives *already* control the Court.

But McCain isn't as consistent in his views as he would like to pretend, and he *is* a very serious conservative -- of the three candidates, he's the only one who I suspect is genuinely against gay marriage in principle. (As opposed to the Democrats, who are probably unsupportive mainly as a matter of sad but sensible political tactics.) I would say it's entirely plausible that he will find a way to amend his public stance in order to look more conservative -- he's done it before. Indeed, the only reason I consider it fairly likely that he won't is that he's already the Republican candidate, so he's tacking a bit more towards the center now.

Still, this election is going to be all about rallying the troops. McCain doesn't have particularly deep support from the current core constituencies of the Republican Party, and his greatest danger is that they simply won't vote. Yes, he's got a lot of support from the center -- but much of that is predicated upon a persistent misimpression that he's a social moderate, and I think it's unlikely that that is going to survive the next few months. So he has a nasty political calculation to make, about whether he needs to do *something* that will not only make him look credible to the social conservatives, but make them passionate about voting for him.

Will he change his stance? I dunno. I hope not for several reasons, not least that it would damage my already-wounded respect for the man. I would be much happier to see him stick to his guns: being a man of principle is about actions when the stakes are high. If he does switch to supporting an amendment, everyone should prepare for what will likely turn into the real ground battle over gay marriage -- given the timing and circumstances, I suspect that this would be the biggest and most important fight over the issue.

So let's hope for status quo, but be ready for possible rapid escalation of the issue...

Comments

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

Boy you folks in MA have some strange ideas! Like that you are more gay-friendly than CA. Here in the midwest, we don't know what you guys do, but we do know that CA is home to the majority of gay people in the US. I think we think that probably half the gay folks in America live in San Francisco. In fact, I suspect most of us think that CA was giving out gay marriages before MA. We also know that those same overly chilled out gay folks in CA are the weirdos who think that medical Marijuana is legal (though we believe that the Federal Govt disagrees with the CA State Govt and still catches those druggies sometimes).

re: In fact, I suspect most of us think that CA was giving out gay marriages before MA.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

That's because they were.

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

Okay, and just for the people reading this who don't know me, I grew up in RI, went to college with Justin in MA, and am firmly in the MA camp, not the midwest one... and also, I live in Chicago, which is surrounded by the midwest but is not actually in it.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

the biggest and richest state in the country

Well, actually Alaska is the biggest.... (/nitpick)

As one reporter I heard this morning said, Now 1 in 9 people in the US can get married.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Biggest in population. Square miles don't have much influence on politics.

[driftingfocus.livejournal.com]

And actually, Texas is also bigger than California.

[driftingfocus.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people (both in the state and outside the state) don't realize just how different Massachusetts actually is from the rest of the country. We have gay marriage. We have universal healthcare. The other day I read something about a bill being brought forth to legalize prostitution in the state.

We're like a little European country, only within the US.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

We do not have universal health care. We have a law that bullies you into purchasing it by taking away your tax credit, forcing you to make the financial decision of whether you want to pay for health care or give up that tax benefit. Either way it costs a lot of money and strikes hardest at precisely those it was meant to help (those in the lowest income bracket), and doesn't actually help anyone but allows us to have something that we can point to and boast about how progressive we are.

Now that I have the off-topic stuff out of my system...

Wouldn't it make more sense, from an achieving-ends standpoint, for the gay-marriage lobby to argue for the abolishment of heterosexual marriage in the eyes of the law and give everyone civil unions?

[jducoeur]

We do not have universal health care.

Just FYI -- while I agree that it's flawed, I actually think the MA system (as enacted, without the gutting that Romney attempted) has a lot of sense to it. It annoys the hell out of everybody, but that's the nature of a compromise. As a first cut, I think it's okay: room for improvement, but a fair start. (The flaws you list are *entirely* intentional -- it simply wouldn't function without them.) But that's a separate discussion, that we can talk about some other time.

Wouldn't it make more sense, from an achieving-ends standpoint, for the gay-marriage lobby to argue for the abolishment of heterosexual marriage in the eyes of the law and give everyone civil unions?

Sure, and some actually do so. But there is absolutely a snowball's chance of hell in that actually happening, at least on the national level: while it's a fine and logical proposal, logic has *nothing* to do with this issue. Think about it this way: people always react most strongly when something is taken away from them. This proposal, no matter how constructed and no matter how sensible, would be taken as "Those Gay People Are Taking Marriage Away From Us!", and that interpretation would be used to fan mass hysteria on the subject. I can think of few better ways to destroy the gay-rights movement.

Politics is, as they say, the art of the possible. The most possible track to equal rights is more or less the one we're currently on, IMO. It's by no means ideal, but it looks to me to have the highest probability of success...

Abolishing marriage

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it make more sense, from an achieving-ends standpoint, for the gay-marriage lobby to argue for the abolishment of heterosexual marriage in the eyes of the law and give everyone civil unions?

No, because that would mean pulling out the rug from under people who are currently married—for example, most people who get health insurance from their spouses' employers would lose it. The only way to avoid that would be to define "civil union" to be a synonym for "marriage", which would defeat the point.

Re: Abolishing marriage

[serakit.livejournal.com]

That is the point. Everyone seems to be having difficulties with the word "marriage". So take that out of the equation. They keep saying that a civil union is the same thing and why do they need marriage- so make it the same thing. That method also defeats that other argument, that they want marriage so they can sue churches that claim homosexuality is a sin.

Re: Abolishing marriage

[jducoeur]

On the purely rational level, I largely agree with serakit on this. The *best* solution would be to get government entirely out of the "marriage" business. Remove the word "marriage" from civil law, change it all to civil unions, and provide really good equality before the law for those. Make it clear that "marriage" is a religious institution, and that the government is absolutely uninvolved with that. Marriages and unions would probably overlap by 90%, but that's not the concern of the law -- the point is to strongly decouple the religious and civil concepts.

I don't push that particular idea, because I don't think it stands the slightest chance of actually *happening* any time in the next 10-20 years: the politics just plain don't work. But I think it would be a very elegant solution were it possible...

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

If McCain is smart, he'll flip now while no one is paying much attention to him. (Not that they ever do.) Then Senator Obama [likely] will have the burden of fielding questions about why an amendment with such support would be wrong.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

I would like to think that Minnesota might be one of the next, but I've lost touch with the political situation there - for all I know, they're becoming a red state.

[jducoeur]

Well, right at the moment it isn't clear to me that *anybody* is trending red: the Republicans are in miserable shape all over, it appears. That'll shift sooner or later, but for the moment they're mostly focusing on keeping the next election from being an absolute wipeout...