Is It Really the Wedge Issues That Control the U.S. Vote?
Opinion Piece on Gay Marriage and the Midterm
Elections
by Rachel Maddow
News flash for the "values
voter": George W. Bush and his Republican Party strategists think you're
a chump.
They think you're a windup doll, a
brainless Tickle-Me toy, that can be set off in a
predictable frenzy whenever they squeeze you just right.
If they poke you in the ribs and
say "gay marriage," you're supposed to instinctively vote
Republican.
Even if you're fed up with
everything else about the Republican Party and George W. Bush, those magic
words are supposed to turn you into a GOP-voting automaton.
Is it going to work this time?
In October 2004, George W. Bush
said, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a
legal arrangement, if that's when [sic] a state chooses to do so. … I view
the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable
people to have rights."
Two years later, the New Jersey
State Supreme Court ruled that it agree with George W. Bush circa 2004: "Although
we cannot find that a fundamental right to same-sex marriage exists in this
state, the unequal dispensation of rights and benefits to committed same-sex
partners can no longer be tolerated."
The court said it wouldn't push
marriage on the state, and it handed the issue over to the state legislature
to come up with an equal-rights solution.
A state defining its own legal
arrangements to enable people to have equal rights? That's what George W.
Bush said he favored in 2004. So why is he railing against that ruling on the
campaign trail, saying it "raises doubt about the institution of
marriage'?"
He's railing against his own
position because he thinks he can get away with it.
If you're an American who opposes
gay marriage, the president and his strategists think you're a chump. They
depend on your reflexive, unthinking vote. They count on you to not know or
care about Bush's actual stance on gay marriage. They count on you not
comparing his stance before the last election with his stance on the issue
now.
And it's not just gay marriage.
Republican strategists treat the average voter like a chump on all the wedge
issues. Wedge issues are designed to be so inflammatory that they override
voters' ability to think rationally.
They count on you to not notice,
for example, that Republicans have had 12 years in control of the House to do
something about illegal immigration, if they cared about it so much.
Some voters probably are chumps,
and the George W. Bush commemorative New Jersey State Supreme Court ruling
may in fact deliver the GOP a handful of anti-gay marriage knee-jerk votes.
But the power of wedge issues
rests on their ability to eclipse reason. In 2004, the well-stoked threat of
gay marriage may have been scary enough to drive socially conservative voters
to the polls on that issue alone.
No one I know thinks the issue
will have as much resonance this year.
In 2006, do straight Americans
still fear that gay marriages will nullify their own? Have 2½ years of thousands
of legal same-sex marriages in Massachusetts
caused a sky near you to fall?
If you do feel that gay marriage
is a catastrophic threat to the nation, do you still feel like George W. Bush
and this crew of Republicans in Congress is the family-values army that will
crusade tirelessly against same-sex legal coupling until you feel safe?
In 2006, the issues that truly
make it seem like the sky might fall are worries that unite us as Americans,
rather than divide us.
Left, right and center, we're
worried about how to stop the bleeding in Iraq.
Left, right and center, we're
worried about the threat of terrorism, and scary countries having nuclear
bombs.
Left, right and center, we're
worried about health-care costs, and debt, and whether there will be good
jobs for us and our kids.
When presidential-hopeful Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and re-election-hopeful Marilyn Musgrave,
R-Colo., argued this year that stopping gay people
from getting married was the most important issue facing the country, didn't it
feel like a blast from the past?
In 2006, it's hard to think of
many people who will play the chump on gay marriage: people who will ignore
their feelings about Iraq,
terrorism, our nation's place in the world, health care, the economy, or any
other of our myriad concerns, to vote reflexively for the GOP because of the
threat of gay marriage.
Republican strategists will play
up this issue for the next week to try to scare up as many chumps as they
can, but I don't think they'll find as many as they're hoping for.
Rachel Maddow
is host of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on
Air America
Radio.
Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet
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