The Politics of the FMA

WaPo provides an overview here.

The reality is that the Republicans are on the verge of driving a wedge into their own party. The partisan calculus of the FMA---which I'm sure is behind the principle-less Karl Rove's decision to put Bush out front on this---is that by playing to fear, hatred, and resentment of homosexuals, Bush and the Republicans will be able to secure national victory by winning over culturally conservative swing voters. (Karl Rove, as you might recall, organized the infamous push poll campaign in the South Carolina primary suggesting to Republican voters that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman.) The historical precedents are Nixon's southern strategy, and the time-honored tradition on the European right of Jew-baiting one's way into office (for those interested, the Greenshirts of Hungary are an ascendant party these days).

Mercifully, it's not going to work: "[O]pinion polls generally show that most Americans agree with Kerry and Edwards in opposing same-sex marriage and a constitutional amendment to bar it, and some strategists question whether Bush and other Republicans are taking a risk in pushing the amendment."

In addition, the segment of the Republican coalition pushing for this most heavily isn't doing so out of Rovian opportunism: they really want to destroy the burgeoning social recognition of gay equality and strip gay people of all legal rights. Rick Santorum thinks that homosexuality should be punishable either by imprisonment or confinement to a psychiatric facility.

These people want to know who the infidels are in their midst. They will not share a party-identification with non-fanatics, federalist conservatives, or even those moderate enough to think that the proposed amendment violates Constitutional principle. Bush has, perhaps cynically, allied himself with dogmatists of a medieval ideology; send him back to Texas.