Bush's feeble "family values" ploy is just a dutiful payoff to his base -- and it won't make much difference in November. ------By Michael Schererm -- Salon
June 6, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- There is something queer about this week's Senate crusade to outlaw gay marriage. If you listen closely, the leaders who oppose single-sex unions refuse to talk about gay people. They talk about activist judges, welfare rolls, the rights of voters and the birthrate of single mothers in Scandinavia. But there is not a gay man, a lesbian woman or a bisexual teenager in the mix.
Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, a 2008 presidential contender, led the charge for a constitutional amendment on the Senate floor Monday, dominating the debate with a handful of blue-and-white charts that he said showed the need for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He had line graphs, bar graphs and circle graphs. He spoke about French law and Dutch sociology. He went on about the benefits of two-parent families. "It's important that a child be raised between a loving couple," Brownback declared, a phrase that seemed, at first, to be an argument in favor of gay marriage. "Developmental problems are less common in two parent families." He said that welfare encourages out-of-wedlock births and called for more research on marriage. But the Republican senator made no real mention of men who love men or women who love women.
In fact, the principal argument mounted by social conservative leaders like Brownback has more to do with the fragile state of heterosexual marriage than homosexuality. Their convoluted logic works like this: If society approves of long-term homosexual monogamy, then the "institution of marriage" will be weakened. This will lead straight people to abandon monogamy and harm the welfare of the nation's children, who benefit from stable, two-parent families. "Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them," explained President Bush in his Monday address to amendment supporters. "And changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure."
This is why Brownback has been spending so much time studying Nordic marriage trends. He believes there is a direct (albeit inverse) correlation between gay marriage and heterosexual fidelity. "Where gay marriage finds acceptance, marriage virtually ceased to exist," he said in the Senate, reading aloud from one of his big blue-and-white posters, this one labeled "Scandinavia." "The institution no longer means much of anything."
These straight-marriage-in-trouble arguments are everywhere in the current debate. Just a few hours earlier, they had dominated a Monday press conference in the Capitol, just a few feet off the Senate floor. "When marriage declines, children and society suffer," explained Matt Daniels, the founder of the Alliance for Marriage, an umbrella group of churches and synagogues that wrote the anti-gay-marriage amendment. "Violent crime, youth crime, welfare dependency and child poverty track more closely with family breakdown than with any other social variable, including race and income level."
Daniels, who describes himself as the child of a single welfare mother, had gathered black pastors, Hispanic leaders, rabbis and a Mormon elder to make the case against lasting homosexual bonds. But rather than talk about gay marriage, a dozen speakers, including Colorado GOP Sen. Wayne Allard, took turns expounding on the importance of loving, two-parent homes for children. They talked about the damage done by deadbeat dads in the inner city, and the importance of family in minority communities. As the Rev. Eve Nunez, an Arizona pastor put it, "America has been wandering in a wilderness of social problems caused by family disintegration."
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