Mar 19, 2004  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

THE CAST OF “SATURDAY Night Live” used to perform a sketch involving a man and a woman on a date, and after each one would say something, the audience was privy to what that person was really thinking. Usually the truth was far afield, and sometimes the polar opposite, of what was said out loud.

Of course the same phenomenon is common in politics, but the issue of gay marriage seems to bring out some of the worst in doublespeak. Like any contentious cultural issue, there are partisans on both sides of this debate with principled positions and competing worldviews. The sad thing is that none of those people is running for president.

President Bush is, by all accounts, a committed Christian with a traditional view of marriage as between a man and a woman, but with a tolerant and comfortable attitude toward those gay individuals and couples he knows personally.

In the 2000 campaign, candidate Bush took the position that marriage is an issue for the individual states to resolve. Four years later, Bush is supporting an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban gay marriage but claims he was forced to act because “activist judges” in Massachusetts and runaway local officials like the mayor of San Francisco are usurping the will of “the people” to decide the question.

The problem is that Bush is apparently backing an amendment that does much more than he says he favors, and instead decides the issue of gay marriage for all of the states by amending the country’s founding document. In fact, the so-called “Federal Marriage Amendment” goes even further, prohibiting marriage-like benefits and recognition, which would likely bar civil unions and many public domestic partner registries.

If Bush really meant what he has said, he would have left the issue to each individual state to decide and endorsed a constitutional amendment providing simply that the courts cannot force one state to recognize another state’s gay marriage licenses.

The Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Clinton in 1996, said exactly that, but conservatives worry that “activist judges” would strike down DOMA. GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, hardly a friend to gay rights, is floating an alternative constitutional amendment that would prevent “activist judges” from doing that; perhaps Bush will throw his support behind it.

BUT EVEN THEN Bush would not really be living up to what he says he believes about the importance of defending traditional marriage. Discouraging gays from entering into long-term relationships will actually have the opposite impact.

Countless “traditional marriages” have ended in tears and heartache because one partner has used the relationship to run away from homosexuality. It could not possibly be in the interest of heterosexual marriage to encourage gay men and lesbians to turn away from homosexuality and instead marry heterosexuals.

Bush claims to be acting to defend the American family, but it is a fact of life that children are already being raised by gay parents. Experts can argue about whether a two-parent, male-female household is really the ideal for those children, but they would all agree that a stable household of any variety is far superior to one that is not. Long-term gay relationships provide a much better environment for those children.

Conservative activists like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council have argued that allowing gay marriage anywhere will also encourage the spread of AIDS by “normalizing” homosexuality. The public health reality, of course, is exactly the opposite: Gay men in committed relationships are far less promiscuous and less likely to spread sexually transmitted diseases than those who are not.

What’s more, as long as Bush and his allies work to prevent gay couples from marrying, private businesses will continue to provide domestic partner benefits for their unmarried employees. These benefits are almost always justified as a way of treating fairly gay employees in long-term relationships who cannot marry, but the policies almost always cover unmarried heterosexual couples as well, and straight couples generally sign up for DP benefits in much larger numbers.

The more these companies provide an attractive alternative institution for straight couples, the more traditional marriage truly is being threatened. Just look at Europe, where civil union-type laws in most countries — adopted for gay couples but open to straight couples as well — have dramatically reduced the number of heterosexual couples who actually go the distance and tie the knot.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE ALTERNATIVE choice to George W. Bush engages is marriage doublespeak to an even worse degree. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry says he has a traditional view ...