Republicans Relaunch Antigay Culture War

www.thenation.com...

As George Bush's poll numbers began seriously dwindling, Karl Rove and the White House political strategists decided to reach into their bag of tricks and come up with a good old staple of reactionary politics: homophobia.

The decision to scapegoat gay and lesbian Americans was poll-driven by an antigay backlash that gathered steam in the wake of the Supreme Court's June 26 decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down laws making gay sex between consenting adults illegal--the so-called sodomy laws. The backlash first surfaced in a July 25-27 Gallup poll. It showed that support for legalizing gay sex had plummeted a dramatic twelve points, to only 48 percent, down from a comfortable 60 percent in favor of legalization in Gallup's May survey. Those saying "homosexuality should be considered an acceptable lifestyle" also slalomed down from 54 to 46 percent; and support for same-sex civil unions dropped from 49 to 40 percent. Two weeks later, a Washington Post poll showed that support for gay civil unions had dropped three points lower than in Gallup's. Since then, five other national polls have confirmed the antigay trend.

Just two days after Gallup released its poll showing the backlash, Bush unexpectedly used a Rose Garden press conference to announce that he'd assigned lawyers to come up with a plan to stop gay marriage. Bush and the Republicans had been under enormous pressure from the Christian right and social conservatives--including National Review and The Weekly Standard--to support a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which would ban recognition of any form of marriage between two persons of the same gender. (The FMA would also forbid giving same-sex couples the "legal incidents" of marriage, thus vitiating the civil-union law in Vermont and any other state that followed suit.)



i have no problem with gay marriage it's prolly only gonna help us now, it'll lighten the threat over population, and homosexuality is a pretty old practise, however not one i'll be practising anytime, i feel as though people should be free to do it, love is love, shouldn't matter between what sexes it is

and people wonder why, despite my conservative-ism, I'm joining the democrats when I get to be 18.

This is bullcrap. Yeah, right, they've been under enormous pressure to get rid of you. Bush, you bastard, this is just some guise to pull it out from the people's fingers.

I think that while Bush is a grade-d idiot, he is extremely shrewd. He's realized that he can control the majority of the American people on a whim, and he is taking full advantage of it. Why doesn't anyone listen to me when I say Bush sucks?

Its too bad I can't kill every US official up until Powell is up to bat... He'd make up for some of Bush's dumbass mistakes.