by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On May 9,
President Obama startled the nation when he gave an interview to ABC-TV stating
in no uncertain terms that his long period of “evolution” over whether he was
willing to support marriage equality for same-sex couples was over. Obama said,
“Over the course of several years, as I talked to friends and families and
neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly
committed monogamous … same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together;
when I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out
there fighting on my behalf, and yet feel constrained … because they’re not
able to commit themselves in a marriage; at a certain point I’ve just concluded
that … it’s important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex
couples should be able to get married.”
It may not have
been that big a revelation to long-time Obama-watchers. Shortly after his
announcement a quote surfaced from a questionnaire from the Chicago Queer paper
Outlines he’d filled out during his
first Illinois State Senate campaign in 1996, in which he’d said, “I favor
legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such
marriages.” But it’s one thing to say that as an obscure candidate for the back
bench of a state legislature, and quite another to say it as a sitting
President facing a tough re-election campaign. It was a stunning act of
political courage, especially from a chronically cautious, risk-averse
politician like Obama.
Though polls
taken since his announcement have indicated that 67 percent of respondents
think Obama came out for marriage equality “mostly for political reasons,”
versus only 24 percent who say it was “mostly because he thinks it is right,”
it’s hard to see much potential gain for Obama and easy to see substantial
risk. The same polling indicated that, though most voters said Obama’s support
for marriage equality wouldn’t affect their vote in November either way, 26
percent said it would make them less likely to vote for Obama and only 16
percent said it would make it more likely.
The Los
Angeles Times reported on May 22 that
Gallup’s tracking polls for May 1-7, just before Obama’s announcement showed
Mitt Romney leading Obama 47 to 44 percent — essentially a statistical tie —
and the same polls for May 15-21 showed an identical 47-44 percent margin for
Romney. Times reporter David
Lauter concluded that the issue had had “zero” impact on Obama’s chances for
re-election, but even that is deceptive.
As we all
remember from the 2000 election, you don’t win the presidency by getting more
popular votes than anyone else. You win it by getting more Electoral College
votes than anyone else, and since they are awarded state-by-state, that means
you have to get more votes than anyone else in enough states to give you at
least 270 electoral votes. Same-sex marriage is relevant to this equation
because Obama’s support for marriage equality is likely to help him in
cosmopolitan states like New York, Massachusetts and California — places he was
likely to carry anyway and additional votes aren’t going to do him a damned bit
of good.
It’s going to
hurt him — perhaps even kill him — in the so-called “battleground states,”
particularly in the South. Obama made his announcement just one day after North
Carolina voters passed a sweeping anti-marriage amendment by a 22-point margin.
(Need I remind my readers that every
state whose voters have had a chance to vote on marriage equality — including
California, twice — has rejected
it?) This bill not only banned legal recognition of same-sex marriages, it also
forbade domestic partnerships, civil unions and any acknowledgment of legal rights between unmarried
partners, straight or Queer. North Carolina was one of the three former
Confederate states Obama picked off from the Republicans in 2008 — the others
were Virginia and Florida — and it’s where he chose to hold the 2012 Democratic
National Convention. His pro-marriage stance is likely to send the entire South
back into the solidly Republican column where it was (with the arguable
exception of Florida in 2000) in both of George W. Bush’s elections.
I’m sure Obama
is a savvy enough politician to realize that a stand for marriage equality is
going to cost him more than it gains him in the electoral arena. About the only
good it’s done him so far is shaken a little more money from wealthy Queer
donors — and even that’s probably not going to do much to change the financial
equation of the 2012 election. Obama’s campaign is still going to have scads of
money in direct donations, and Romney will still have the aid of secret
multi-millionaire donations to the supposedly “independent” super-PAC’s which
crushed his Republican opponents and will more than neutralize Obama’s
advantage in candidate-controlled campaign funding. Obama’s stance will also
hurt him among homophobic African-American ministers who supported him
enthusiastically in 2008 but who this time around, though they’re hardly likely
to back Romney, may well either sit out the election (and encourage their
congregations to do so) or give Obama a tepid endorsement at best.
So if Obama
didn’t come out for marriage equality in 2012 for politically opportunistic
reasons, why did he? I think he finally reached his “aha” moment, in which —
like other prominent politicians, including San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders — he
realized he simply couldn’t go on saying that one group of people in one sort
of family were “better” than other people in other families and therefore
entitled to greater legal rights. And, by his own account, he reached that
moment because he was surrounded by a lot of Queer people in loving, committed
relationships that clearly meant as much to them as his own relationship does
to him. (In Mayor Sanders’ case, it was his own Lesbian daughter who brought
him to that awareness.) If nothing else, this underscores the importance of
Queer people being as “out” as possible to their families, friends and
employers; as we’ve known for decades, the
more Queer people someone knows, the less likely they are to hate and fear us
as somehow “other” than them.
I can identify
with Obama’s “evolution” on marriage equality because I’ve gone through
something like it myself. By coincidence, around the time of his announcement I
was looking at my journal notes on a December 2004 screening of a film called Freedom
to Marry, and I was stunned that even
though I’d been with my current partner (now my lawfully wedded husband!) for
nearly a decade, I wrote after that movie that “I don’t feel particularly invested (in either sense of the word — philosophical or
financial) in the same-sex marriage issue,” and added that even before the
November 2004 election, in which Bush’s victory was often attributed to the
religious Right’s use of anti-marriage initiatives to mobilize conservative
voters, “I had a weird ambivalence towards the speed with which [marriage
equality] had become the defining feature of Queer liberation.”
Yet when the
California Supreme Court opened the window for Charles and I to get married in
2008, we both leaped through it — and now I’m a member of the steering
committee of the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) and, to
paraphrase the National Rifle Association’s famous rallying cry, they can pry
Charles’ and my marriage license from our cold, dead hands. And I would hope
that Obama’s marriage equality announcement will put an end once and for all to
the delusion of many of my Leftist friends (including some of my colleagues in
S.A.M.E.) that there’s “no difference” between Democrats and Republicans and
therefore it doesn’t matter who wins this year’s election. The choice is clear:
Barack Obama, who says, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married” — or Mitt Romney, who says,
“I will fight for an amendment to our Constitution that defines marriage as a
relationship between one man and one woman.”
