Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spent Monday night selling himself as the 2016 campaign's fresh face of tomorrow. Yet on Tuesday, MSNBC's Kasie Hunt
immediately zeroed in on one of Rubio's major problems: his stance on same-sex marriage is so 1999.
Kasie Hunt: Seventy-four percent of young Americans show in the NBC poll that they back same-sex marriage. Are you out of step with younger generations on that issue?
Marco Rubio: No—well, ultimately the decision on how we define marriage has always belonged to the states. And if in fact, as the polls indicate, a growing number of Americans believe that sex—marriage between two individuals of the same sex should be—legal, then they can petition their state legislatures and change their state laws.
And in fact, I suspect you’ll see that happen. It’s already begun to happen. So at the end of the day, I always believed marriage is regulated by states. I’ve never supported a federal constitutional amendment on—on marriage.
Rubio followed the new GOP playbook on gay marriage—stating his support for the right of states to decide the issue. But there's two problems with his answer: first, he appears to have lied about never supporting a federal marriage amendment (FMA). In his inaugural bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010,
Rubio filled out a candidate questionnaire for the Christian Coalition saying he supported an FMA.
A Christian Coalition spokeswoman confirmed that Rubio had filled out a candidate survey in 2010 when he was running for the Senate in Florida and attested to the voter guide’s accuracy, which she said was rigorously checked against candidate’s questionnaires, votes, and public statements.
Head below for his second reason and for how Rubio faired the rest of the week.
Rubio's second and arguably more important problem is that he flat out opposes same-sex marriage and said so in his brand-new book, American Dreams.
"Thousands of years of human history have taught us that the ideal setting for children to grow up in is with a mother and a father committed to each other, living together and sharing the responsibility of raising their children."
Rubio, who proclaimed on Monday, "Yesterday is over," is clinging to thousands of years of human history to support his antiquated marriage stance. That not only puts him at odds with 74 percent of young voters, but also the
61 percent of young Republicans who support marriage equality.
On Tuesday, CNN's Jake Tapper took Hunt's question a step further.
“On that issue, same-sex marriage, Senator, you’re the candidate of yesterday,” Tapper declared.
By Wednesday, Rubio was telling
Univision's Jorge Ramos that he'd gladly attend a gay wedding.
"If it's somebody in my life that I love and care for, of course I would,” Rubio said. “I’m not going to hurt them simply because I disagree with a choice they've made or because I disagree with a decision they've made, or whatever it may be.”
The
Washington Post declared the statement "
the GOP’s next (small) evolution" while Salon's Joan Walsh called it Rubio's "
gay rights hypocrisy."
They got it about right: It's a little evolution and a lot of hypocrisy. After all, even if Rubio would attend a gay wedding, he still thinks people should be able to deny services to one. Here's what he told NPR's Domenico Montanaro this week:
"I think there's a difference between not providing services to a person because of their identity, who they are or who they love, and saying, I'm not going to participate in an event, a same-sex wedding, because that violates my religious beliefs. There's a distinction between those two things."
No, there's not a distinction. People don't ask florists or bakers to "participate" in their weddings. They ask them to provide services—not attend it or contribute a meaningful reading. And if they would provide those services to a straight wedding but not a gay wedding, then they are not discriminating against the event but rather the people who are taking part in that event.
But Rubio's faulty logic aside, he spent the week dodging marriage questions and trying to signal that he isn't quite as behind times as his views suggest.
The 2016 election cycle will be filled with instances of Republicans attempting to mitigate their antigay stances in order to have a chance at appealing to millennials and being a viable candidate in the general election.
What's most stunning is that 43-year-old Marco Rubio spent the week failing that test miserably.