Photo by brainchildvn/flickr.com
The news is out about former Bush Campaign Manager and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman being out. The byline here, as reported by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic, is that “Mehlman is the most powerful Republican in history to identify as gay.”
Is there shock, outrage or jeering coming out of the big, bad GOP? Not really.
In fact, by way of personal anecdote, there was an immediate outpouring of support via Facebook amongst the former Bush 43 campaign staff. We were saying “Amen” and “Double Amen” to article posts that were popping up. And we were ‘liking’ the supportive status-report statements being posted by friends and colleagues.
Kate Zernike of the New York Times said it succinctly:
“Had a former chairman of the Republican National Committee announced in 2004 that he was gay, it would have been a bombshell. In that hard-fought election year, Republicans and Democrats were rushing to condemn a court for establishing the right to same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.
“Six years later, in a midterm election cycle that is otherwise fierce, campaigns are largely silent on the issue of same-sex marriage — even as two federal courts have issued similar decisions in recent months upholding the rights of gay people to wed.”
Why this tidal change, you ask? Many journalist and bloggers are making the “generational” argument, which truly stands on its own. It’s not so much a question of whether you born into a Republican or Democratic household, but rather whether you were born prior to or post 1965.
Allow me to suggest that the warming within the GOP ranks – and, moreover, across the American heartland – to gay marriage and Proposition 8 is just as much commonsensical as it is generational.
Same-sex committed couples all around us
Here is the deal: Consider the divorce rate. While there are various ways to measure this, the bottom line is that America has the highest divorce rate in the world. (See it here).
Some people (like me) would argue that over the last century heterosexual couples in America have managed to make a mockery out of just that – the (heterosexual) institution of marriage. I am not just speaking on a whim here – again, the statistics stand on their own. (Feel free to peruse the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on divorce here).
Seeing that marriages come and go so whimsically here in America– why should the male-female scenario have a lock on what is defined as marriage?
Marriage by definition is supposed to be a “union.” Unions are not supposed to be broken. Period. (I mean, no one would propose breaking up the United States of America unless you are Governor Perry of Texas…)
If a same sex-couple wants to be bound in unity, forever, by law – then why should they be prevented?Why should two people who are serious about forever be denied the legal recognition of forever?
Today, you and I see same-sex committed couples all around us – they are our neighbors, colleagues, bosses and friends. Commonsense just says that they too should have a shot at what the heterosexual couple has not yet mastered – that being marriage.
‘No business discriminating against the love of homosexuals’
My (conservative) friend Ross Douthat said this all more thoughtfully and eloquently in one of his recent New York Times op-eds The Marriage Ideal. I encourage you to read his piece. By the end, you will find yourself nodding – it makes sense! Consider this bit of common sense below.
In this landscape, gay-marriage critics who fret about a slippery slope to polygamy miss the point. Americans already have a kind of postmodern polygamy available to them. It’s just spread over the course of a lifetime, rather than concentrated in a “Big Love”-style menage.
If this newer order completely vanquishes the older marital ideal, then gay marriage will become not only acceptable but morally necessary. The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights. And a culture in which weddings are optional celebrations of romantic love, only tangentially connected to procreation, has no business discriminating against the love of homosexuals.
Sarah Lenti is the blogger behind NMPolitics.net’s The Savvy. E-mail her at sarah@nmpolitics.net.