BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, July 26, 2004
GAY MARRIAGE AND DEMOCRATS.
Bennett Lawson is a young gay man from Chicago. An aide to his
hometown Democratic congresswoman, Jan Schakowsky, Bennett has come
to Boston this week to do volunteer outreach to the
gay/ lesbian/ bisexual/ transgender community. At around 1 p.m. today he
was standing outside a conference room at the Sheraton, where the
GLBT caucus was holding a standing-room-only meeting. His job was to
guard what looked like hundreds of bag lunches prepared for those
attending the caucus.
I wanted to ask Lawson about a
rather unusual phenomenon: the passionate support that gay and
lesbian activists have for same-sex marriage, and their seemingly
equally passionate support for John Kerry, even though both he and
George W. Bush oppose gay marriage.
Of course, I'm being deliberately
disingenuous in phrasing it that way. Yes, Kerry opposes gay
marriage, but he also recently voted against a constitutional
amendment that would ban gay marriage, an amendment pushed by none
other than Bush. Kerry also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act
in 1996, a nasty law that was happily signed by Bill Clinton. Still -
aren't folks like Lawson just a wee bit put off by Kerry's lack of
support for one of the gay community's principal issues?
"He's running nationwide in a
country that is not exactly comfortable with gay marriage," Lawson
replied. "His record is very, very strong on gay issues. Every good
liberal has to moderate things in order to run nationwide - or, in
Illinois, to run statewide - but his record really speaks for
itself."
I told Lawson that he sounded like
he didn't believe Kerry when he says he genuinely opposes same-sex
marriage. "No," he replied, laughing. "You know what? I don't." And
since Kerry supports civil unions, with all the rights, benefits, and
responsibilities of marriage, that's good enough for Lawson.
Still, Lawson is less than thrilled
at the notion that the Democratic Party establishment would prefer
that gay and lesbian voters support Kerry without making too much of
a fuss. "I would like to hear the word 'gay' a lot more than I'm
hearing," he said. "At the same time, I don't know what that
gains."
Shortly before I spoke with Lawson,
California senator Barbara Boxer addressed the GLBT caucus. "George
Bush has decided that, this year, you're the scapegoat, and I'm here
to tell you that you're not the scapegoat," she told the crowd. She
raised the specter of a re-elected Bush getting the opportunity to
name as many as four Supreme Court justices, and observed that
Congress rushed to judgment on the anti-gay-marriage amendment even
as a number of homeland-security bills sit unacted upon."They knew
they didn't have a chance to pass it, and thank you for all the work
that you did," Boxer said, but added: "This hurtful campaign isn't
going away. They've just begun."
Given the wildly enthusiastic
reception accorded Boxer, I was surprised to learn that her stand on
same-sex marriage is exactly the same as Kerry's. In a brief
interview, conducted on the run as she headed off to another
engagement, Boxer told me that she favors domestic partnerships and
civil unions with all the rights of marriage, but not marriage
itself. When I sought to clarify by asking her whether she
specifically opposed gay marriage, she responded that she would
rather stress what she's for rather than what she's
against.
I also asked her if she was
concerned that, despite Kerry's official opposition to gay marriage,
the Republicans would seek use the enthusiasm of Kerry's gay,
pro-marriage supporters against him. Her response: "If they want to
do that, I think they would be making a terrible mistake."
It's pretty obvious that gay and
lesbian activists such as Lawson believe Kerry, Boxer, et al.
are being deliberately cynical about their true feelings when it
comes to same-sex marriage. Ironically, so do Karl Rove and company.
Whether Kerry's inner self supports gay marriage or not, he's clearly
walking a very narrow path on the hottest of hot-button
issues.
Personally, I'd love to see him
come out and declare forthrightly that same-sex couples should be
allowed to marry. But at the very least, he's decided that that would
amount of a political suicide note. And maybe he even thinks it would
be wrong.
posted at 3:38 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
