Maybe McCain should have ‘adopted’ a consistent position

July 17, 2008

Over the weekend, John McCain told the New York Times that he opposes gay adoption, even if the alternative is leaving a child in an orphanage. A few days later, McCain’s campaign reversed course and said the senator doesn’t actually believe what he said — “caring parental figures,” even if they’re gay, are “better for the child than the alternative.”

This has been a politically tricky story for McCain. In the wake of his interview comments, published Sunday, McCain drew fairly intense criticism from gay rights groups and adoption advocates, both of which were pleased to see McCain quickly reverse course.

But in making them happy, McCain has once again made the unhinged wing of his party far less happy. Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody wrote:

I’m confused. John McCain gave an interview to The New York Times this week saying he was against gay adoption but then his Communications Director sought to clarify those comments afterwards by saying it was a ‘state issue” and that “caring parental figures are better for the child than the alternative” of abandoned children.

Huh? That sound you just heard was a can of worms opening up…. I mean if you’re going to say that you’re against gay adoption then why not just stick with that view rather than trying to massage it? The qualifier after the interview does some damage. Why? Because McCain had an opportunity to add the gay adoption issue to his Evangelical checklist and now it’s muddy. […]

Evangelicals are already feeling fidgety about McCain and have concerns about him on a number of issues. Why add to the list?

Brody wrote this on Tuesday, shortly after the McCain campaign “clarified” the position, but the religious right’s discontent has festered.

The Family Research Council also expressed its displeasure in an email to members.

Trying to appeal to both moderates and social conservatives, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has generally tread lightly on some touchy values issues. That was not the case last weekend when the Arizona senator’s personal experience led him to make some candid comments about his opposition to homosexual adoption. The GOP nominee, whose daughter Bridget is adopted, answered questions about what type of parents are best suited for raising children. In response to New York Times reporters who said, “President Bush believes that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt children. Do you agree with that?” McCain said plainly, “I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family, so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption.” When the Times pressed him with, “But your concern would be that the couple should be a traditional couple,” McCain replied “Yes.”

After the Times interview, McCain’s communications director, Jill Hazelbaker, reportedly issued a statement that qualified the senator’s remarks. If it came to choosing between remaining unadopted and or having homosexual parents, she said, “McCain believes that in those situations that caring parental figures are better for the child than the alternative.” The remark only muddies the waters. It’s incumbent on mother-father families to step up so that no child faces a dilemma like this. At the same time, abandoning the mother-father model has a cyclical impact by weakening the traditional family unit. The McCain campaign should not fall into this “lady or the tiger” trap and should emphasize the need to rebuild the natural family.

As a substantive matter, I haven’t the foggiest idea why far-right conservatives — and John McCain, as of Sunday — would oppose children in need going to live with people who will love and care for them.

But as a political matter, McCain continues to find himself tied in knots, trying to appear reasonable while keeping a very unreasonable Republican base happy.

Brody says, “Evangelicals are already feeling fidgety about McCain and have concerns about him on a number of issues. Why add to the list?”

This is precisely why the driver of the “Straight Talk Express” is proving to be unable to express even a hint of straight talk. Courting evangelicals is shaking hands with the devil. There is absolutely no way to govern a country designed by, of and for the people while keeping the religious right happy. They will eat this country alive.

  • “At the same time, abandoning the mother-father model has a cyclical impact by weakening the traditional family unit.”

    yeah, right. and what “study” told them this? it’s just so much more bullshit coming from the fundies on the right. and yet, because they say it over and over, people believe them. idiots.

  • If John McCain succeeds – heaven forbid – in getting himself elected president, I suspect you’ll see him followed everywhere by a team of statement janitors, running around to clean up up the trail of verbal elephant poop that McCain keeps dropping.

    With a candidate like McCain, the Republican symbol ought to be changed to TWO elephants, both of ’em squatting.

    Yours Crankily
    The New York Crank

  • I love this story, I’m not sure why. It may be just self-confirmation, that I am on the correct side.

    The obsession that the Republicans have with hating gay people is just so unbelievably bizarre to me. Not just that, but the fact that they keep coming out and saying so. Out loud. They’re not the slightest bit embarrassed.

  • I don’t think that those of us in the reality-based world truly understand what a hot-button issue homosexuality is for the religious right.

    A woman I know is a “born again”, literalist Christian, though she attends one of the less overtly Republican churches. She is a kind, generous person — she’s even leaning towards voting for Obama. But she has two blinds spots. One is that she thinks efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East are naive and pointless because God has promised that war in Israel will bring about Armageddon, and soon. The other blind spot is homosexuality.

    For conservative Christians, the correct way for John McCain to answer a question about homosexual adoption is, “OF COURSE leaving children in orphanages is better than putting them under the control of people whose goal is to ‘indoctrinate them’ into their loathsomely deviant lifestyle!”

    It does no good to challenge her opinion logically. Her beliefs were formed by a complete belief in the inerrancy of the Bible (and don’t DARE go there with her — http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_ntb3.htm) and re-enforced by a large dose of incorrect information. She dismisses studies that show that homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals as “politically correct”. Pointing out the number of girls molested by heterosexual men does nothing to shake her belief that homosexuals are natural predators.

    It’s a generation problem. Her children are more tolerant, having been exposed to gays living openly. But the prejudice won’t end until the bigots of this generation die out.

  • SteveT: Some very valid points. I know this woman, too. But, I also know several relatively young people [late 20s, early 30s] who are just as adamant, misinformed, and naive. They believe things like:

    1] it’s the public school’s duty to help them teach their children to love and trust God.
    2] everything the ACLU does is evil.
    3] all liberals are Atheists.
    4] homosexuality is a choice.

    And they believe all the support they need is right there in the Holy Bible. Thanks to Falwell and his ilk, there is a new generation of religious intolerants who are just waking up to their political and societal duty of assuring the Founding Fathers “dream” of a deeply Christian nation will be realized and that the war with homosexuals and Muslims will be won.

    In other words, the “End Times” are gonna take for-freakin’-ever!

  • All you have to know about the RR is that their agenda keeping getting whites solidly in the majority and protecting their privileged status as leaders of this country and the free world. The so-called “gay agenda” threatens that status by tying whites up in non-procreating relationships that will potentially siphon off special tax and legal status. All this is wrapped up in the Bible just like slavery once was and yes, there are some who really do believe that it is unnatural and that it can be taught.

    This is also why many of them are Repugs – because they attempt to keep minorities down financially and politically by enacting legislation that enables the gentry class to keep their wealth. The agenda also keeps Christianity (mainly Protestant Christianity) the dominant faith because it is the traditional faith of the white race. Catholics are tolerated because many of them are white in this country and their agenda complements, but world-wide it has become a minority (i.e. Hispanic) faith.

  • This could have a real impact on my life. Now that hubby and I are back in Seattle, he wants to look into adopting, which we couldn’t do in Florida, thanks to Anita Bryant and her fundie xtian friends. I have no intention of voting for the Repug candidate, but this is an issue I will be following more closely.

  • It’s always fun to watch McCain play all sides of an issue, contradictions be damned, but I think my favorite little detail in this story is a strange phrase in the Family Research Council email: “McCain’s communications director, Jill Hazelbaker, reportedly issued a statement . . . ” You have to love a source of news/opinion that puts a qualifier — “reportedly” — on whether or not a statement was issued.

  • Always hopeful @ 10: It’s funny because it’s true.

    And after all, we are talking about the most fundamentally hypocritical people on earth. Why else would they drive around in SUVs with stickers that say “Support Freedom. Vote Republican.” and yet strive to legislate inequality into the Constitution?

    Then again, the same people who remind us that “Freedom Isn’t Free” are violently opposed to any new taxes, even for the wealthy.

  • The McCain camp is disorganized. If they can’t get it together now, this late in the game, I don’t want to think how disastrous they’ll be if they win in 2008.

  • chrenson said:
    SteveT: Some very valid points. I know this woman, too. But, I also know several relatively young people [late 20s, early 30s] who are just as adamant, misinformed, and naive.

    I didn’t mean to suggest that the children of the woman I was talking about were open-minded lefties. Just that they weren’t irredeemably bigoted against homosexuals.

    Always hopeful said:
    All you have to know about the RR is that their agenda keeping getting whites solidly in the majority and protecting their privileged status as leaders of this country and the free world.

    The woman I talked about is fairly free of racial prejudice and her children are completely racially colorblind. Both parents grew up here in the diverse Maryland suburbs of D.C., so they’ve interacted with racial minorities all their lives.

    The solution is to expose people with prejudices to the people who scare them so they can learn that “those people” aren’t really very different from themselves. It’s a slow process, particularly in areas that are monochromatic and mono-cultural. And I’m talking about the majority of the people in the religious right who are basically good people, though seriously misguided. With the evil members of the religious right who benefit personally from creating hatred and division, all we can do is wait for them to die out.

  • I guess it’s better to have busy rich parents where the father is kind of a jerk and the mother steals drugs from her charity, than nice gay parents.

  • In this country, a half million children are in the child welfare system. Every year, over one hundred twenty thousand children ʻage-outʻ of the system because no one adopted them. How did they get there? Heterosexual unions gone bad!

  • I gotcher traditional family unit right here, Freaky Family Relgiously Insane Council. I wonder how concerned they are about straights like me who will never get married because of all the bigotry from the sanctimonious pagan occult superstitionalists who have corrupted the very concept of marriage.

    Plus:

    As a substantive matter, I haven’t the foggiest idea why far-right conservatives — and John McCain, as of Sunday — would oppose children in need going to live with people who will love and care for them.

    Because, silly – those kids might catch teh Gayy and start lusting after the family Norwegian Blue*. Or realize that homosexuals are not the deviant pedophilic monsters that the majoiry of the christian cults make them out to be. Then they’ll start questioning the truth (or lack thereof) in their big book of religious fairy tales, and maybe even stop handing over some of their cash to the church!

    * – Beautiful plumage!

  • My favorite thing about this argument: “4] homosexuality is a choice.” is that it’s hilariously inconsistent. The argument goes, “homosexuality is a choice. Therefore we should discriminate/not allow people’s choices to dictate their rights”

    Religion is quite clearly a choice. Born again people have, by definition, “chosen” their religion. There’s nothing genetic about which religion you choose (hence the whole concept of missions/proselytizing). You don’t hear any of these same people agreeing “Religion is a choice. Jews have chosen a religion outside of the majority religion, which believes Jews are going to hell. Therefore, Jews should not be a protected class when it comes to discrimination.”

    (Well, maybe you do from O’Reilly), but the point is that whether it’s a choice or genetic is irrelevant (legally) when it comes to discrimination based on that. We quite clearly (as a country) support anti-discriminatory measures based on all sorts of “personal choices”.

  • Could we take a moment and remind evangelicals that JSMcC*nt also supports embryonic stem cell research?

    Has this guy actually been in Republican’t politics for over 20 years?

  • As an anecdote, I can confirm attitudes are changing. My “moderate” parents were “OK” with homosexuality about 10 years ago, but opposed to “gay marriage” and skeeved out by gay PDA.

    Now my parents are very anti-Republican, disgusted with anti-gay attacks, and adamant proponents of gay marriage and adoption (i.e. “What’s the problem? Why can gays not be married? It’s no threat to me”).

    There will be 20-25% of the people on the far right that will probably never change their minds. We’ll have to wait for them to die off for their influence to lessen in the voting booths. But for the vast swath of people either “in the middle” or young and more open to change, attitudes are indeed undergoing a seismic shift, even amongst traditionally Republican friendly demographics.

    Republicans can repeat what happened during the 50s and segregation (they became the party of racism by absorbing all the racist Democratic party-switchers) and enjoy another 40 years as the minority part, or find a way to extricate themselves from the death pact they have going with the right-wing nut jobs. I’m not too “hopeful” for their ability to do the latter.

  • It seems like four times a week I read about a McCain instaflip, where in consecutive days he flips from P to not-P. Anyone keeping tabs on this, what the tally is up to?

  • David Brody acts like evangelicals have one voice…his. They don’t. It’s the conservative authoritarian brain that thinks his opinion is everyone else’s opinion also. McCain is tied in knots with opposing groups pulling on the strings and which ever hurts the most is the one that gets the attention.

  • The McCain campaign should not fall into this “lady or the tiger” trap and should emphasize the need to rebuild the natural family.

    Ummmm… the traditional family, if I understand the usual meaning of teh word, doesn’t have adopted children in it.

    Make it as strong and typical as you like, Ward June, Wally and teh Beav, and you STILL have unwanted kids in the orphange.

    Maybe they’re concerned that if we had enough parents then out of wedlock pregnancies ccouldn’t be as cstigmatized?

    To paraphrase Theodoric of York:
    Maybe what’s called for here is a call for Christians to hew to the message of Matthew 25 and every loving family adopt one of these children, these least of the children of God. ..

    NAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

  • So … why is McCain within 2 points of Obama in the latest polls?

    Given the sort of campaign he is running, that just astounds me.

  • Terrance over at Pam’s House Blend wrote a wonderful piece today on McCain’s “natural family” remarks and what it means to him as a gay man and adoptive father.

    http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6164

    On McCain: doesn’t this old fart EVER stop trying to have it all seven ways? You’d think he couldn’t figure out who holds the mortgage to his career or something. Maybe he’s just momentarily confused…

  • For a breath of fresh (that is, historical) air, readers are urged to go to Yahoo and type in Dave MacPherson’s “Dangerous Radicals of the Religious Right.” Louise

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