I know it's not exactly uncharted territory to bash on Michael Steele, but I just can't resist. He apparently just said the following, as an 'argument' against gay marriage:
Now all of a sudden I've got someone who wasn't a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for. So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money.So now the GOP is anti-marriage? Does Michael Steele really not understand that this supposedly devastating health care effect happens daily to tens of thousands of businesses suffering under the weight of breeder marriages?
Given that his party is ALL ABOUT defending marriage, he clearly can't mean that. I think this is one of those instances where someone blusters so much that they forget themselves and actually stumble into saying what they really mean. Because this statement - stripped of the preposterous small business angle - amounts to the following: "gay people aren't people and thus don't deserve things we treat as customary for straight people."
Seriously, his argument is that marriage is so bad for the economy that we should only consider allowing it for straight people. Which I'm sure would have worked a decade ago, but even in 2004 when we suffered a major setback on gay marriage, the right had already figured out that defending discrimination wasn't going to fly. So they couched it in terms of 'traditional marriage' and 'defending the rights of kids to have two parents' and other assorted nonsense that translated the real issue into code in an effort to nullify the bigotry charges.
Michael Steele, though, sees himself as the Bill Cosby of the 21st century GOP and thus hasn't noticed any cultural events of the past two decades. So he just says stuff like this and once again shows himself to be the complete buffoon that we've come to know and love these past few months.
UPDATE: Reading the actual AP story, it gets even funnier. Steele came up with this argument as "an example of how the party can retool its message to appeal to young voters and minorities." Because the one thing that young voters and minorities LOVE to hear about is how people who own small businesses matter infinitely more than excluded minorities.
I wonder what it's like in Michael Steele's world. Does the rain fall up? Do people bathe in dirt? Is Mr. Rogers a deranged pyschopath?
4 comments:
No, of course you are twisting things.
Gay people should be able to get married. I see nothing wrong with civil partnerships - health insurance, taxes, etc., but marriage as a sacrament and ceremony should be reserved for heterosexual couples who are planning, or hoping, to have families and children.
The whole insurance thing is a canard, as the partner would have to pay premiums, so yes, that is a GOP ploy.
Um... sorry Charles but I don't think you're being fair on this one. He's just critiquing the "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" position by saying socially liberal policies have fiscal implications. Businesses that made employment contracts expecting a certain cost now have a sudden rise in their expenses when they have to pay for a lot more employees' spouses.
Now maybe substantively that's really a ridiculous drop in the premiums' bucket. And maybe it's hypocritical because the GOP encourages straight marriage, which would also cause this harm.
But it's not some major revelation of some underlying hatred of gay people. It's a fairly effective way to tell the libertarian types that their neat distinction between social liberalness and fiscal conservativeness isn't so clean -- and they'll have to make choices between those values inevitably.
I don't think his arg is that it's so bad for the economy that only straight people should get married. I think it's a "yes tolerance is nice, but where there's a small cost to the economy it's not worth it." It makes sense to the conservatives who don't say "I don't like gay marriage, but since it doesn't harm me at all I'm not going to oppose it." Yes it takes for granted that gay marriage isn't socially important --- not the same as saying gay people aren't people. And while I totally agree that the rationale behind the restriction is dehumanizing, I don't think this is some particularly revealing episode.
I prefer to see it as an add-on to the ban marriage counterplan. Not only does it resolves the "who can get married?" question (answer: "no one"), it also saves the economy.
cha-ching
In other triviality, I think I read somewhere that a few nut jobs did, in fact, pickett Mr. Rogers' funeral because he didn't use his show to bash on gay people. Maybe you were implicitly referencing that, though...
Ban marriage CP. Net benefit: Econ DA w/ a small biz internal link. I was thinkin it- glad Scott said it before me. Yeeahhh. Except my preferred strat would be ban marriage AND universalize health care :) But in the meantime, marriage would be nice- mostly for the sake of my future kids.
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