Bush made a strategic mistake committing to a marriage amendment. Now's the time to hammer him on it, and three little words are all it takes.
[Crossposted, with apologies, from my NY Times watcher blog,
Reading A1.]
First discriminatory amendment. Like it or not, the
gay marriage battle has been
well and truly joined. It doesn't matter that Rove is trying to finesse the issue by having Bush endorse a Constitutional amendment, while avoiding specific endorsment of the
Musgrave amendment now before Congress. [I take that back: it does matter, as an acknowledgement of political reality:
AP reports unnamed "White House officials" saying that support for Musgrave "has been unraveling in the Senate," and implies that the tap-dancing in Bush's announcement results from awareness of the fact. The delay in making any announcement at all is even more telling, I think: Bush's social-conservative base has been waiting weeks now for Dear Leader to step into the ring; I take that as
prima facie evidence that Rove isn't nearly as eager for this fight as the more timid Democratic fawns are afraid he is, and doesn't at all see it as an out-and-out winner for the Thugs.]
First discriminatory amendment. This isn't about what's on the front page now, it's about what needs to be on it in the coming months. These three words state, as compactly as possible, a powerful meme, one that I think will be overwhelmingly effective in the struggle over any marriage amendment, one we need to start propagating—"we" meaning not just lefty bloggers, but Democratic operatives at every level—relentlessly. The argument is simple and, on its own terms, all but unanswerable: the history of the Constitution is the history of increased enfranchisement, increased civil rights, increased liberty; the Thugs propose to reverse that history. The more aggressive and disciplined we are in maintaining this argument as our point of attack, the more we determine that the discussion over a marriage amendment is about civil rights and not about "sanctity." We force the battle to be fought, in other words, on our ground, not Karl Rove's.
Our side wins the rights argument: the social fascists have been trying for years to portray the question of gay civil rights as an issue of "special" rights, and look how far that's gotten them. First discriminatory amendment shames the other side. Tar the Thugs with discrimination, and they lose the middle. If I were Karl Rove, I wouldn't feel confident about this battle in the least.