In 2006, Michele Bachmann campaigned to amend the Constitution of Minnesota to prohibit gay marriage. Five years later, she said that issues related to gays and lesbians should not be major issues in the presidential election.
Question 1: Is it progress, or is it just politics? Question 2: Does it really matter?
In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" the day after Bachmann Straw Poll Iowa Ames won, the Minnesota congressman and 2012 presidential hopes of avoiding questions and gay society. "I am a candidate for president of the United States. I'm not running to be judge anybody," he said, adding later, "[...] these questions are not really what people care about now. "(1)
Bachmann interviewer David Gregory recalled that she called same-sex marriage a defining issue of our time politicians. He played a video clip of a National Education Conference 2004 which said that homosexuality was a form of "personal bondage, personal despair and personal slavery." Bachmann stuck to his talking points today - their beliefs about gays and lesbians are not relevant to his presidential campaign and she is not judgmental.
Bachmann is not the only candidate in the Republican camp, whose message about gay and lesbian issues has recently undergone a makeover. Like Bachmann, the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney spent the first part of the last decade, leading the efforts for a state constitutional amendment opposing gay marriage. When the highest court of the state ruled in 2004 that all residents are entitled to the same rights to marriage, Romney did everything possible to ensure that the right extends to nonresident same-sex couples who were not allowed to marry in the Bay State until 2008, after Romney left office.
Since then, however, Romney has tried to present as a support of some gay rights, particularly those related to employment and other financial matters, even as it continues to oppose gay marriage. His evasive maneuvers have been criticized both from the extreme right and extreme left, while helping him to establish his niche as the Republicans are going to moderate.
On the surface, changes of both candidates seem to indicate that his statements were more products of the strategy of personal beliefs all the time. Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, told The New York Times that Bachmann "recipe" is to "find the problem, use it to mobilize politically to groups previously marginalized or disconnected." As a state senator, that meant disenfranchised objective social conservatives. Now, through the Tea Party, Bachmann has found another group of supporters who have more energy per fiscal issues than social. Although some of these fiscal conservatives are also social conservatives, not all are.
With the arrival of Gov. Rick Perry's career, Bachmann probably lost much of their evangelical followers, leaving his challenge to Romney on economic issues. For this you need to maintain fiscally conservative fan base intact, even if that means dropping some of the social issues which was based on his early career.
Since Bachmann and Romney are the politicians, it is not unreasonable to assume that your circumstances change to suit their current political needs. That may be true, but it is also possible that Bachmann's comments on "Meet the Press" and a more delicate Romney on gay rights are not just about the strategy. You may actually change their minds.
As governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, powerfully stated in his speech after the adoption of the draft law of your state marriage equality, the majority of today's political coming of age in a different political climate in that still there was no room in the political spectrum "to" Marriage Equality. For them, coming to accept the rights of gays and lesbians has been a personal and a political process. The progress of this process was evident in the Theatre Ads by several senators from New York who has changed their positions in the last days before the vote.
In recent years we have seen that allowing same-sex couples to marry in any way interfere with the ability to opposite-sex couples "to do so. We have seen that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military makes our troops stronger, not weaker. We have seen their friends and neighbors that same-sex couples may be the love of husbands and fathers. TV shows, including ABC's popular "Modern Family" have reinforced this lesson . As a result, public opinion on issues of gays and lesbians are changing, and the opinions of public officials who are also changing.
Some politicians, including New York state senators who switched their votes on the bill for marriage equality, have publicly admitted they were wrong. Doing so takes courage, however, that not all politicians can be expected to muster.
A generation ago, many politicians - and others - fervently believed that interracial marriage was forbidden by God. Almost none of them explicitly admitted that they were wrong, but very few continued to insist on their beliefs following points of view came to be regarded as wrong and unacceptable. However, he did what Bachmann and Romney are doing now: He changed the subject. Many public figures today is unlikely to ever completely agree with marriage equality. But as the morality of homosexuality remains a controversial issue in society, it will no longer be an issue in politics.
We have not reached that point. Bachmann and Romney have moved away from some of his more extreme views, but the two candidates, along with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (who withdrew from the race) and former Senator Rick Santorum, has signed a commitment to the promise to support a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage in a way that excludes same-sex couples. The promise is a shameful exercise in gay-bashing sense, and that the amendment has zero chance of passage, but the Republican primary participants still feel the need to appease the anti-gay elements in the party's base. That is a stain on the Republican Party's unfortunate, but that naturally heals itself as society becomes more accustomed to the families of gays who live the same life as others.
We can not say with certainty whether Bachmann change is a change of tone or a change of heart, but it is certainly a change for the better. His position takes us one step closer to a time when equal rights for same-sex couples is not a subject of debate.
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