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Evan Wolfson: ANALYSIS: The wrong thing to do: Clinton's anti-gay advice

Freedom to Marry
November 5, 2004

According to the November 15th issue of Newsweek, former President Bill Clinton urged Senator John Kerry to support state anti-gay constitutional amendments, though not the federal initiative:

Clinton Advice Spurned — "Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the Red States, former President Bill Clinton, in a phone call with Kerry, urged the Senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides,'I'm not going to ever do that.'"

Evan Wolfson comments: If this is true, it was bad advice from the president who was effective in small-bore outmaneuvering the right-wingers, but not in blocking their advances at every level of government. It was bad advice both because it is immoral and wrong on the merits, and because it would not have worked.

• As the defeat of Senate candidates Brad Carlson (OK) and Inez Tenenbaum (SC) showed us yet again (and as I argued in our candidate advisory a year before the election ), Kerry would never have been sufficiently anti-gay to appease the anti-gays. Remember, this civil rights debate in our country is really not about marriage; it's about gay people and whether we should have any place in American life, period.
• Trying to "triangulate" and take an anti-gay position in favor of discriminatory amendments would have cost Kerry among his base and among Americans who do respect equality and gay rights, while not satisfying the anti's.
• Had Kerry tried to embrace blatantly discriminatory amendments (most of which denied not just marriage but all legal protections) while preserving even a modicum of his core (and correct) position in support of gay Americans' rights and families, he would have been labeled (again) a flip-flopper. And the incoherence of such a position would have exacerbated Kerry's inability to do what Bush appears to have done in many people's eyes: articulate a clear message (even one people disagree with) and exhibit core principles he is willing to fight for — character traits that they ultimately respect and connect with.
• Finally, supporting the use of constitutions to discriminate against a group of Americans is the wrong thing to do — cruel, unAmerican, and unconstitutional, as well as inconsistent with the vision the Democratic party (and even the Republican party for much of its history) has stood for.