Sep 30, 2005  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

THE SUMMER IS over, the trees will soon change colors, and across America, teams cheered on by thousands are engaged in pitched battle to move the pigskin over territory marked down to the yard.

Yes, we’re once again being treated to that favorite sport of football, but the pigskin — like last fall — is the freedom of gay couples to marry.

What separates this sorry game from the one played in stadiums is that the two teams — the Republican Pander Bears and the Democratic Invertebrates — are interested only in political points, not actual victories on the policy playing field.

THE REPUBLICAN GAME plan for gay marriage has been on display since last season, and has been credited with a string of electoral successes. The GOP uses opposition to gay marriage, much as it has a woman’s right to choose, to ensure its fan base makes it to the games.

With rare exception, these GOP players are more interested in pandering to conservative Christians than actually succeeding in changing at least the most fundamental federal laws.

Republican candidates dread being asked in debates if they really want to arrest pregnant women and their doctors for seeking abortions. And few people actually believe George W. Bush wants to amend the United States Constitution to prevent his vice president’s daughter from marrying.

But as Head Coach Karl Rove has laid out the strategy, election victories and not such radical policy changes are the real game here.

The transparency of their game plan is evident in the plays they try to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, which went down to defeat last year with the help of players from both teams. The Republicans argued that unelected judges have been deciding on their own that gays should be allowed to marry, taking the issue away from state legislatures, where it belongs.

But the FMA isn’t really about stopping “activist judges” and empowering state legislatures, because it would define marriage in the nation’s founding document as heterosexual-only and prohibit elected state legislators from debating and voting on the issue for themselves.

And when California state legislators voted last month to enact full marriage for gay couples, one of the GOP’s star linebackers, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, reversed field and complained that it was the courts — and not the legislature after all — that should decide the issue for Californians.

BUT JUST IN case you’re thinking this is a game played by only one team, consider the more subtle — and every bit as hypocritical — game being played by the Democrats.

The Democrats consider gay Americans and our friends and family as among their core fan base, so they claim to be committed to our equality. But to far too many on that team, marriage equality is just another football to be used to score more points on the opposition.

So when Schwarzenegger fumbled the marriage football in California, Democratic quarterback Howard Dean was ready to score some yardage. He fired off a statement last Friday, taking the governator to task.

“Apparently Governor Schwarzenegger has ripped a page from President Bush’s re-election playbook,” Dean wrote. “Rule No. 1 … is to demonize groups of people and use them to divide the electorate by rallying the extremists to your base. It’s the only way to explain Governor Schwarzenegger’s promise to veto the California marriage equality bill.”

Hold on a second. Isn’t this the same Howard Dean who has repeatedly stated his own opposition to marriage equality, arguing that Vermont-style civil unions are close enough to equality for “LGBT families”? California already has domestic partner legislation that is the equivalent of Dean’s Vermont-styled civil unions, so unless Dean has seen the light on gay marriage, the two men actually agree on the issue.

Does this mean Dean “demonized” gays when he opposed marriage equality in his run for president last year?

The Democrats also have just as many trick plays when they’re afraid our political football will cost them political yardage. For much of 2004, Dem players gave speeches to gay-friendly groups arguing that President Bush was demonizing gays by pushing a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. But when it came fall election time, Invertebrate quarterback John Kerry came out in support of a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in Massachusetts.

Even when the federal amendment was being debated in Congress, the Democrats tried their best to hide the ball. With only a few notable exceptions, every single Democrat who spoke in opposition to the amendment argued either that the entire measure was a ...