President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

What you said about Kerry and gay people enjoying equal protection of the law, isn't what his stance actually was. He was in favor of civil unions that came with the same exact legal protections as a marriage. What he opposed was calling it a "marriage." It was a semantic distinction as far as he was concerned.

This was the kind of distinction a lot of people were making when this was taking shape, because marriage had always been between a man and a woman, and getting people to embrace a change to a very etrenched norm is difficult.

Does that make him (or Bush, if he was pandering) a coward? Maybe. But welcome to presidential politics in 2004.

My personal feelings toward things like this is that there is no reason for this to be dictated by our government. If two men or two women want to get married, it has zero impact (negative, at least) on the life of any heterosexual person, just as if a man and a woman want to get married, it has no impact on any gay person's life. Which is why my attitude then (as now) was pretty much, "If two people want to get married, regardless of who they are, they should be free to do what they want."

If Ellen Degeneris wants to have animus toward George Bush because he insisted that marriage should remain between a man and a woman, which really was pretty much the politically viable stance regardless of party in 2004, that would be her right. I'll walk a mile in her shoes before I judge. If she doesn't, though, because she thinks he's a fundamentally decent guy, that's her right, too. I'm not going to stand on a soap box and tell her how to feel.

As I said in my original post, though, my sense has always been that Bush is a decent guy and he was never a person with hateful beliefs. I suspect if you could get an answer out of him today about it, he'd be fine with gay people getting married. His dad was an official witness to a gay marriage in Maine a year or two before he died. Attitudes in America changed a bit between 2004 and now. To look at 2004 through the prism of 2019 and try to impute attitudes or motives that way is wrong, in my opinion.

 

I don't know if I am following you correctly. But if you are trying to make a distinction between what George Bush was advocating in 2004 and what John Kerry was saying, and making one, "denying a group equal protection of the law" and the other "a passive approach," you are rewriting history.

John Kerry was AGAINST gays being allowed to get married. He was in favor of it being decided at the state level, and he was for civil unions being allowed at the state level.

There was nothing "passive" about his stance. That is exactly what he was saying.

If it's a "denying a group equal protection of the law" issue, the practical implications of what he advocated for were EXACTLY THE SAME as was what George Bush was advocating for, even if Bush was pandering to the Christian moralists with a, "We should amend the constitution on top of it, to prevent states from legalizing gay marriage." Bush, too, said he favored civil unions and that it should be left to the states to decide if they wanted those unions, which someone could argue was notable, because he was against his own party's platform.

As far as denying a group equal protection of the law, civil unions were legally the same as marriage -- it really was a semantic issue, as in, "Don't call it marriage!" The area where it legally made a difference was that at the Federal level it wouldn't have come with the same social security benefits, if you want to make an argument about it not offering equal protection under the law. There again, though, John Kerry was in the exact same place as George Bush. He was opposed to gay marriage. There was nothing passive about his stance.

 

Again, though, I don't see it as "pro gay" vs. "anti gay." Marriage had always been between a man and a woman. Getting people to see the world differently, and make a change to an entrenched norm, was the issue. A lot of those people weren't "anti gay," it was them being resistant to changing a status quo that had pretty much always been the status quo.