Republicans are pushing gay marriage as the wedge issue that will win them this election. To wit: a majority of Americans oppose gay marriage. Why the fuck this is, I have no goddamn clue. Personally, I'd like to see a candidate with real balls take issues like this and convince the American people that they're wrong. I suppose actions like that are reserved for activists, not politicos, though.
Dealing with the reality of the situation, Kerry needs to get elected. To do so, he must simultaneously shift the focus from gay marriage to real issues and make it so Bush can't make gay marriage the swing vote.
The article is fairly meaty. Here are some choice ideas:
"What's more morally reprehensible?" Darby asks. "To embrace the idea of same-sex unions or to have young men and women dying in the name of some invisible weapons of mass destruction?"
"It should be an inalienable right, guaranteed by our Constitution, to live in a marriage-based society," said Robert Knight, director of the Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute.
"One of the problems the Republican Party has with swing voters is that Republicans are seen as divisive and intolerant," says a prominent Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified. "That's one of the reasons that people who make $100,000 a year and live in the suburbs and whose interests are otherwise aligned with Republicans find themselves voting with the Democrats -- they find the Republicans too intolerant."
"That's the way all the Democrats are," said Focus on the Family's Stanton. "They can't support gay marriage and they can't not support gay marriage, and they're falling all over themselves trying to be consistent."
Bush appears to be in for an uphill fight against a popular incumbent, but then the whispers and the rumors start. Maybe there's a lesbian working for Richards. Maybe she's using state funds to visit her lover. Maybe Richards herself is gay.
...
Bush says nothing about the rumors, but he doesn't have to. The stories are everywhere, and one day a Bush surrogate -- a state senator serving as Bush's East Texas campaign chairman, a guy who just happens to have worked with Rove -- says just enough about the rumors to get the word into the press. Richards' appointments of "avowed homosexuals," he tells a reporter, might be a liability in her campaign for reelection.
Just like that, the allegation is on the record, the rumors become newspaper stories, and Bush becomes governor of Texas.