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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron Just when it seemed that we had put abortion behind us as the “social issue” dominating the political debate, supplanting it with same-sex marriage, it comes roaring back to life with the health care reform bill.
And to bring the issue home to the Ocean State, we have the verbal fisticuffs between Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Bishop Thomas Tobin.
The gay marriage issue is also hot locally, thanks to Gov. Donald Carcieri and his veto of the bill that would let a domestic partner handle funeral arrangements for a deceased loved one.
How did little ol’ Rhode Island, a state so blue it could break down and cry, suddenly become a hotbed of right-wing social issues?
It’s like tic-tac-toe.
Tic-tac-toe is a simplistic game of x’s and o’s. You are either an x or and o and there is no in-between. It is so simple a game that, unless it is being played by five-year-olds, there is no way for it to end except in a stalemate.
The debates over abortion and gay marriage are like games of tic-tac-toe. They are such visceral issues that there is no common ground or meeting in the middle. You are either for it or against it. You have to be an x or an o.
This makes both issues great tools for inserting into other, unrelated subjects that you want to grind into a gridlocked stalemate. It is like shoving a stick into the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
You want to make a debate over health insurance reform stop dead in its tracks? Introduce an abortion provision and all of a sudden, nobody is talking about reforming health insurance anymore, they are fighting over abortion.
You want to veto legislation that would give domestic partners (of any combination of genders) the right to direct the funeral and other final decisions for their deceased significant other? Well, just tie it in with gay marriage and you have a whole different fight on your hands, one that is never going to end and that neither side is ever going to win.
Once you start quarrelling about the divisive, visceral issues like abortion and gay rights, it’s difficult to get back to a place where you can have rational discussions about things like health care and make compromises. Those hot-button issues harden the hearts and, more often than not, harden the heads, of those on both sides.
Changing the discussion so that it is about abortion or gay marriage can also sidetrack it into a whole variety of endless loops.
Is the Rhode Island media — newspapers, TV and radio news, radio talk shows, blogs, etc. — talking about how good or bad the Obama health reform effort is? No, it is talking about how good or bad a Catholic Patrick Kennedy is because he got into a spitting contest with the bishop over abortion.
Whether or not Patrick Kennedy takes a vote in Congress is important public information that is a legitimate topic for debate. Whether or not Patrick Kennedy takes a campaign contribution is likewise fair game for public discussion. Whether or not he takes the Eucharist, or is given it by the church, is not. Public official or not, there are some subjects that are none of the public’s business, and a man’s relationship with his God and his church is definitely one of those.
But as long as the public has an obsessive thirst for such private and intimate details of the lives of those in the spotlight (you know who you are) there will be media outlets out there to slake it (we know who we are, too).
Channel 12 News put the subject of Kennedy’s Catholicism on an online viewer’s poll for Pete’s sake. So did WPRO-AM, dragging its advertiser, the Paul Masse car dealerships, into the fight. What type of human being would respond to an online poll to pass judgment on another person’s religious beliefs?
So, that was a pretty effective digression from the health care reform debate, wasn’t it? It took up almost a quarter of this column.
Governor Carcieri pulled the same trick. Casting about for a reason to veto the domestic partner funeral legislation that didn’t make him sound hard-hearted or homophobic (he insists he is neither), he settled on the old slippery slope argument.
He wrote in his veto message that the bill “represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage.” What? This legislation was about burying the dead; it had nothing to do with anyone getting married.
But even more disingenuous was the governor’s reasoning that, “there is no official or recognized form of domestic agreement in Rhode Island. What constitutes a domestic agreement or relationship contract is vague and ill-defined.” Well, gee whiz, why is that so? Could it be because the state’s top public officials like the governor and the leadership of the General Assembly won’t let there be one?
But, bogus as it might have been, the governor’s tactic was effective.
Nobody was talking about survivors in a relationship other than man-woman marriage being able to bury their dead loved ones last week. They were talking about the governor’s relationship with the gay community.
Carcieri also got himself out of the spotlight nicely, meeting with a gay group for an hour and then coming out and saying of establishing a officially recognized status for gay couples that “Maybe it is something we should consider,” without committing himself to it one way or another with just one already-busy year left in his term. We’ve been “considering” it for more than a decade now, when will it be time to take a stand and make a decision?
Why do I have the nagging feeling that this issue is still going to be unresolved when a new governor takes the oath in 2011?
If we continue to deny gay and other unmarried couples the most basic human and civil rights, because we fear that each one we grant will be another step toward the fire and brimstone path of homosexual marriage, and if we squirt away the best opportunity we have had in a century to provide good, affordable health care to every citizen in this country because we got into a fight over abortion, then we are going to have a lot to explain to future generations who ask: What were you thinking? |
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