Truth - Al Franken [52]
Did Alan Keyes and his wife abuse their gay daughter, Maya? Absolutely. If you count exposing her to Alan’s insane anti-gay tirades.
Did anyone in the White House leadership actually agree with the FCR’s perverted view of homosexuality, and disagree with the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics? I really doubt it. But that didn’t stop them from throwing bone after bone to the bone-craving Christian activists pushing anti–gay marriage ballot initiatives in eleven states.
Every one of those initiatives passed. And Bush got his 4 million additional evangelical votes. Combine those facts with the “moral values” 22 percent exit poll factoid2 and you can see why so many analysts thought the election was a triumph for the religious right.
This view was immediately bolstered by certain interested parties, such as leaders of the religious right who wanted to make sure that the White House knew whom it owed.
No one was more excited than Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University. In a public letter to the newly elected president, Jones laid out his hopes and prayers for Bush’s second term:
Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by Biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government.
Oh, and one other thing:
Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.
Gulp.
Thing is, I know a lot of liberals and not one of them despises Christ. Personally, I like Christ. I don’t worship him, but as my rabbi told us when I was a kid, Jesus was a great prophet who had wonderful ideas—none of them new.
So, I bear no ill will toward anyone’s Christ, and particularly not Bush’s. It was Jesus, after all, who helped Dubya stop drinking. As bad as things are now, can you imagine how much worse a fix we’d be in if Bush were still hitting the bottle, slurring his way through another morale-boosting speech to the troops or staggering around a G8 summit? Thank you, Jesus.
But Jones III and I don’t just disagree on whether I despise Christ. We also part company on the question of who elected Bush and why. In his letter, Jones writes, “In your reelection [sic]3 God has graciously granted America—though she doesn’t deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.” According to all the exit polls I’ve seen, paganism had little or nothing to do with the outcome of the election.4
Also—and this is probably the more important point—Bush’s victory was not a resounding triumph of the religious right. Yes, Bush got more votes from self-identified evangelical Christians than he did in 2000. But he and Kerry got more votes from all kinds of places. Bush got 11.5 million more votes than he did in 2000. Kerry got 8 million more than Gore. And, in fact, Bush’s vote share increased more among people who rarely or never go to church (3–4 percent) than among people who go to church one or more times a week (1 percent). And it’s not just me saying that. It’s Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, whom you’ve never heard of.5
More specifically, there are some serious problems with the idea that Kerry got reamed because of the gay marriage issue.
Here’s another political scientist you’ve never heard of. Stephen Ansolabehere. And another one: Charles Stewart III. You might think you have heard of him, because a Charlie Stuart killed his wife in Boston back in 1989 and blamed it on a black guy. But that was a different Charles Stuart entirely.
Coincidentally, Stewart and Ansolabehere also live in the Boston area, since both are political science professors at MIT. The two of them make a compelling case that the eleven anti–gay marriage ballot initiatives didn’t help Bush at all, and possibly worked against him. Only four of them were in battleground