E-Mail This Article to a Friend A sheep in wolf’s clothing? (continued)

Since the presidential race appears so tight — the latest numbers show Kerry ahead of Bush by only two percentage points, 51 to 49 — the Republican Party has to woo more than just the Christian right. The Bush campaign must also win over the six percent of undecided voters — "the NASCAR moms and dads," as they’re known — living in key states. Typically, this camp tends to vote Republican, since they oppose abortion, gay rights, and gun control. Yet this year’s NASCAR voters are worried enough about the Iraq war and the economy that they could lean toward Kerry, observers argue.

To stem this shift, GOP strategists are trying to damage Kerry by playing up the Three G’s in the culture wars — guns, God, and gays. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, explains that Republicans want to put Kerry on record as opposing the FMA. Indeed, while the senator does not embrace civil-marriage rights for same-sex couples, he has denounced amending the US Constitution to prevent gays and lesbians from legally marrying. By forcing Kerry to vote on the issue, the Republicans figure they can spin his position against the FMA as one against the sanctity of marriage — and thus against the American family. Such rhetoric, Sabato says, is sure to hurt Kerry in regions "where emotion is strongly anti-gay-marriage," such as in the South and parts of the Midwest. "Emotion is so solidly on the anti side in those areas that all Republicans need to do is make a connection between Kerry and gay marriage and Bush becomes untouchable," he says, adding that Republicans "don’t even have to talk about the amendment. All they have to say is that Kerry’s record is anti-family."

In many ways, the FMA vote — and the larger issue of gay marriage — represents the Republicans’ best shot at launching a Willie Horton–style attack on their Democratic challenger. (Horton had committed crimes during a weekend furlough from a Bay State prison, where he was serving a life sentence, a tragedy that was exploited by Republicans to attack then–Massachusetts governor and Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988.) After all, observers say, there’s little doubt that Bush will try to link Kerry’s position on the FMA to his stances on abortion, gun control, school prayer, and other traditional "red-versus-blue" issues. Michael Goldman, a former Democratic consultant who now co-hosts Simply Put, a political talk show on Bloomberg Radio, says all these issues form a kind of "aggregate wedge" that Republicans can throw at Kerry.

"The GOP wants to use this vote to paint Kerry as a foreigner, as someone who doesn’t have ‘our values,’" he notes. The GOP used a similar tactic when it invoked the Willie Horton affair to attack Dukakis as soft on crime. Observes Goldman, "The Republicans are going to win or lose based on whether Bush can scare the crap out of people. That’s the only thing they can do at this point."

THERE IS, however, one fundamental problem with the Bush campaign’s strategy: gay marriage — and especially the FMA — has yet to whip Americans into a frenzy, as the Horton scandal did. Same-sex marriage, contends William Schneider, a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a political analyst for CNN, is not frightening enough to independent and undecided voters to provide the Republicans with much extra mileage. "Willie Horton really outraged people," he says. "It angered everybody because it exposed Dukakis as someone who just defied common sense. But that’s not the case here."

If anything, Kerry’s stance on the issue reflects public opinion better than Bush’s. Most Americans, like the senator, make a distinction between same-sex nuptials and the FMA. The Pew Research Center’s polling shows that only 36 percent of those who oppose same-sex marriage also embrace the idea of amending the Constitution to ban it. On the other hand, one in five opponents rejects the FMA — and for good conservative reasons like "leave the Constitution alone," "the government should stay out it," and "let the states handle it." Explains Pew’s Dimock: "The amendment raises these other conservative concerns. You hear conservatives arguing, ‘I may be against gay marriage, but I’m also against the government getting involved in people’s bedrooms.’"

Even Christian-right leaders have been flummoxed by the fact that the FMA has failed to take off among their grassroots supporters. Ever since Massachusetts became the first state to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples on May 17, these leaders have lamented the minimal political outcry issuing from churches coast to coast. The anticipated chorus of righteous right-wing anger has yet to materialize, let alone overwhelm Congress with e-mails, letters, and phone calls calling for the FMA. In Falwell’s June 25 Web site post, he quotes Paul Weyrich, of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, as saying that "too few calls, too few letters, and too few faxes are coming into" Senate offices "urging them to stand firm in defense of marriage between a man and a woman."

"The evangelical community has not been as enthusiastic as its leaders had thought it would be for an amendment," says Green. He attributes this passivity to a "real preference" among rank-and-file evangelicals for federalism and state laws as the solution to social issues. At the same time, he notes that evangelicals feel a deep reverence for the Constitution. "They think of it in divine terms," he says, "so they would be reluctant to alter it unless absolutely necessary." Evidently, even grassroots Christians understand that we haven’t reached a point-of-no-return on same-sex marriage yet.

All things considered, the GOP’s FMA strategy doesn’t seem to have many pluses. On the flip side, meanwhile, it has its share of pitfalls. The FMA, for one thing, highlights the ideological divisions within the Republican Party itself. Nothing illustrates this widening gap more starkly than the FMA testimony given before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 22. That morning, Massachusetts’s Republican governor, Mitt Romney, whose emergence as an anti-gay-marriage spokesperson in this state has brought him national prominence, warned senators that the Constitution must be changed — or else. Same-sex marriage will spread across the country and "may affect the development of children and thereby the future society," he said. Only a federal amendment could ensure what Romney described as "the preservation of a structure that has formed the basis of all known successful civilizations."

Yet just minutes after Romney offered this ominous testimony, former congressman Bob Barr, a conservative Republican from Georgia, told senators that the FMA amounts to an unnecessary trampling of states’ rights. "If we begin to treat the Constitution as our personal sandbox, in which we build and destroy castles as we please," he said, "we risk diluting the grandeur of having the Constitution in the first place."