Jul 16, 2004  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

SCORE ROUND ONE for the Democrats.

Washington politicians generally can’t help themselves when they see a chance to score political points, and the Democrats in the United States Senate took full advantage this week in the debate over a constitutional amendment to ban gays from marrying.

The idea of using our lives as political footballs was originally the brainchild of Republicans, of course. First the president backed the Federal Marriage Amendment in a cynical ploy to energize his conservative base. Then the Republicans in the Senate rushed a vote on the measure to put moderate Democrats on the defensive just before their convention.

No doubt the Bush ploy succeeded in exciting social conservatives, whose friends in the GOP ranks in Congress seemed compelled in the debate to describe our pursuit of happiness with apocalyptic language predicting collapse of the Republic.

But on the whole, Republicans were cleverly outmaneuvered on the issue by Democrats, who devoted almost all their time during what was supposed to be a debate on marriage equality instead asking why the Senate was even discussing the question, since there are so many other issues out there of greater importance.

Barbara Boxer, a Democratic senator from California who has actually said she favors marriage equality for gays, talked at length about these more pressing matters, including Iraq, terrorism, overhaul of intelligence agencies, the economy, even transportation funding — it was a list only a C-SPAN addict could love.

Poor Wayne Allard, the soft-spoken Republican senator from Colorado who introduced the marriage amendment, was left pleading with his Democratic opponents to at least defend their foregone victory with some arguments in favor of gay marriage.

He certainly came prepared to argue the “con” side, offering a litany of terribles should we be permitted to wed, including a curious reference to a marked increase in out-of-wedlock births in Scandinavian countries since they allowed gays to marry.

But if you expected to see Democrats actually rise up and defend our honor against such excoriations — did Allard mean to suggest that artificial inseminations for lesbian married couples are to blame for rising Swedish illegitimacy rates? — you were sorely disappointed.

INSTEAD, TO LISTEN to the Democrats during this week’s debate, you would think the decision over whether to amend the Constitution to ban gays from marrying was about anything but whether we should be entitled to the same marriage rights as our heterosexual counterparts, much less whether our relationships were entitled to equal dignity under the law.

To the contrary, we were treated to a procession of Democrats who took to the podium to note for their record that they, too, believed marriage ought to be limited to that sacred union of a man and a woman. But not to worry — the Defense of Marriage Act would protect the country from the scourge of married homosexuals.

For some reason, these same Democrats, whose voices rose in indignation as they shamed their Republican colleagues for wanting to “write bigotry into the Constitution,” never stopped to explain how it is that their beloved DOMA wasn’t writing that same bigotry into federal law.

To hear gay Democrats talk, we should be patient with these senators for not defending our relationships because their position on our marriage was “evolving.” This week’s debate was a sober reminder that the vote on DOMA would probably be much the same today as it was eight years ago, before it was signed into law by that legendary defender of marriage himself, Bill Clinton.

In fact, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) made a point of reminding us during her Senate speech this week that she had done her fair share on the marriage defense front, before she went on to praise marriage as a uniquely heterosexual institution.

THIS IS THE same Hillary Clinton who was feted at this year’s Human Rights Campaign’s black-tie dinner in New York, where the group’s brand new leader, Cheryl Jacques, talked inspiringly about our need to stand up for ourselves in this critical “marriage moment.”

Then she sat down, but not before offering an irony-free introduction for gay marriage opponent Hillary, who gave the keynote.

President Bush has spoken memorably about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The movement for marriage equality, “led” by HRC, is unfortunately suffering from the “soft activism of no expectations.”

It’s hard to say when we will actually witness our full equality — including marriage equality — be defended in Congress by the men and women who are elected with our dollars and our votes. But it will certainly come ...