Demagogue

From the Washington Post:

President Bush came under fire from some social conservatives yesterday for saying he will not aggressively lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage during his second term.

Prominent leaders such as Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and many rank-and-file Bush supporters inundated the White House with phone calls to protest Bush's comments in an interview published Sunday in The Washington Post. "Clearly there is concern" among conservatives, Perkins said. "I believe there is no more important issue for the president's second term than the preservation of marriage."[bold mine]

This is a fairly common mantra among many well-funded American right-wing groups. But I've said it before and I'll say it again-- anyone who sincerely believes this has a seriously warped sense of priorities. As folks who consider themselves to be moral crusaders who supposedly care about life, it's inexplicable how gay marriage is the most important issue of Bush's second term. It just doesn't rise to that level, especially in this day and age.

Honestly, regardless of a person's position on the Iraq war or the best way to fight terrorism, I can't believe that actual danger and loss of human life doesn't trump whether or not a small minority population is permitted to get legally married. I even understood it when they were so obsessed about abortion. At least in their eyes it is a life and death issue. But gay marriage? For pete's sake, I'm a lesbian who'd love to be legally married and even I consider it pretty far down on the list of "most important things facing America today." In the grand scheme of things, gay marriage is very, very far down on the list and this is coming from someone who is actually impacted by it in very tangible ways. Sheesh.

But the weirdest thing is that these fanatical anti-gay crusaders don't seem to grasp a pretty significant fact-- denying gays and lesbians the right to marry does nothing to actually prevent either homosexuality or gay families. We're already here, legally married or not. No constitutional ban is going to stop us from getting married in front of our families and loved ones, having and raising children, or living our lives. Don't they notice that we do those things already? Unless they are willing to go further than simply banning same-sex marriage, what do they think they're accomplishing exactly?

In a way it's sorta sad when folks like this believe their own hype and intentionally limit their own horizons. It is also stunning how myopically obsessed they are about homosexuality at the expense of everything else-- war, violence, hunger, homelessness, child abuse, abortion, and so on. They set their own agenda, create their own mission, and they willingly choose to make it so excruciatingly narrow and affect so few. If only they could use their well-funded passion for something good instead of feeding their own egos and filling their own coffers.