WASHINGTON — Here's how the Washington Post's Dana Milbank began his Page 1 analysis of the White House's newly announced position on gay marriage: "With President Bush's embrace yesterday of a marriage amendment, the compassionate conservative of 2000 has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004."
This neatly encapsulates everything that's wrong with inside-the-Beltway discussions of the culture war we currently find ourselves in. Presidents do not start culture wars; they react to them. They can fan or soothe passions, but they cannot create divisions that don't already exist.
Indeed, both Bush and the major Democratic presidential candidates, neither of whom supports gay marriage, would have preferred not to have addressed the issue. Why? Because nobody in the moderate, swing-voting center of American life wants to talk about it. This is why Bush and the Democratic front-runners circled each other for more than a year, each side hoping the other would be the first to, literally, make a federal case out of it. Both sides knew that whoever did would be blamed by millions of moderate Americans for inflicting the issue on the rest of "us."
The two parties would still be circling each other like gunslingers afraid to draw their Colts were it not for events in Massachusetts, where a laughably activist court recently asserted that the centuries-old Massachusetts Constitution has always protected the right of any two people to marry, and that any compromise short of actual gay matrimony, including civil unions, would offend the constitution. Across the country in San Francisco, they didn't even bother to rewrite the law; the mayor there just opted to defy it.
Bush didn't create these events. He was, however, forced to respond to them because millions of Americans -- including a huge chunk of his political base -- were deeply offended and angered by what they saw. As a political matter, then, Bush had no choice but to engage this issue even if he didn't want to -- just as President Clinton, politically speaking, deduced he had no choice but to sign the Defense of Marriage Act. The Democrats were in an even tighter spot. The portion of the Democratic Party base that cares passionately about gay marriage is tiny compared with the base of the GOP that passionately opposes it, yet once the issue was on the cultural agenda, there was no choice but to address it.
