JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE
My personal intuitive (i.e., non-scientific, totally unprovable) beliefs are the following:
1. Obama has always favored the redefinition of marriage to remove the gender requirement. He has just decided that now is a favorable time to admit it. If I am correct, then he has been lying. This would make him a liar.
2. Why did he decide that now is a good time to admit it? The people of North Carolina just voted 61 percent to 39 percent in favor of marriage, and against ever removing the gender requirement. If he were simply counting votes in swing states, you’d think he’d consider this a good time to keep his mouth shut.
3. Therefore, he is not just counting votes. He is counting money. The Gay Lobby knows it cannot win popular votes. (This should have been obvious to them for some time.) I surmise that the Gay Lobby is putting lots of money on the table for Obama to publicly support the redefinition of marriage. The Gay Lobby knows it can get stuff done through the executive branch that it can’t get done other ways.
4. African-American voters still don’t like the removing of the gender requirement from marriage, or having the government declare that men and women are completely interchangeable as parents. What is Obama thinking about African-American voters? He may be blowing them off completely and taking their votes for granted. Or, he may be planning to use the money from the Gay Lobby to purchase advertising having nothing to do with gay issues, but designed to scare black voters away from voting Republican. Or, some combination of these.
5. With the Democratic party, it is All Identity Politics All the Time. They have no other issues. Let’s face it, they are dead in the water on economics. Their foreign policy is not credible. Identity politics is all they have left. Expect a very ugly, divisive campaign.
— Jennifer Roback Morse is founding president of the Ruth Institute.
Read responses from others in the symposium here.
