If there’s one person the Bush White House should be able to count on in blocking gay rights, it’s TV preacher Pat Robertson.
Sure, Robertson may be a religious right lunatic who blames liberals for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and calls for nuclear bombs to fall on the U.S. State Department, but he’s still one of the most reliable allies Bush has in grassroots conservative politics (insert comment here about judging a man by the company he keeps).
When it comes to the rights of gays, few Americans can rival Robertson’s enmity. After all, his Christian Coalition has promoted a book that calls for the death penalty for homosexuals and he once explained that Orlando may be struck by a “meteor” for hosting a “Gay Days” weekend at Disney World.
And yet yesterday, Robertson sounded like quite the moderate on CNN.
Wolf Blitzer asked Robertson to respond to Dick Cheney’s position from 2000, in which Cheney said he believed the federal government should not have a policy “trying to regulate or prohibit behavior” when it comes to gay relationships.
Robertson said he disagreed with Cheney’s remark, but nevertheless appeared to endorse the idea of a state-by-state approach endorsed by several Democratic presidential candidates.
“What [Cheney is] basically saying in that one, though, is that I don’t think this should be a federal policy,” Robertson said. “Well, I feel the same thing about abortion. I think that Roe v. Wade federalized the matter of abortion. I think that should have been left to the states and left to the several legislatures to work out. And possibly, that’s what we should do in terms of the these civil unions and so forth. They should be the policy of the state legislature.” [emphasis added]
I don’t know if Robertson missed the memo, but that’s not supposed to be the conservative position at all.
If we leave this to up to the policies of state legislatures, some states may (gasp!) expand the rights of gay couples in terms of marriage, civil unions, domestic partner benefits, etc. That’s why the Bush administration, the religious right, and Republicans in general want a constitutional amendment — to federalize government policy in this area.
And yet Robertson, whose very name is synonymous with religious right madness, sounded like he was more than open to the opposite, offering at least a tepid endorsement of leaving civil unions “and so forth” to elected officials at the state level.
For those keeping score at home, that means Pat Robertson and Howard Dean essentially agree on a state-by-state approach to civil unions for gay couples. I guess the culture war really is over.
This reminds me of a similar problem Robertson had a couple of years ago in which he was talking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about another key issue for the religious right — forced abortions in China. In April 2001, Robertson told Blitzer that the Chinese are “doing what they have to do” to keep the lid on a spiraling population, even if the policy included forced abortions, because the country’s population has topped 1 billion.
Asked by Blitzer to give his thoughts on the forced abortion policy, Robertson replied, “Well, you know I don’t agree with it. But at the same time, they’ve got 1.2 billion people, and they don’t know what to do. If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable.”
Robertson went on to say, “I think that right now they are doing what they have to do. I don’t agree with forced abortion, but I don’t think the United States needs to interfere with what they’re doing internally in this regard.”
After these comments, Robertson quickly backpedaled in the face of extreme criticism from his religious right cohorts.
I wonder how many of them will be troubled by Robertson’s new-found moderate streak when it comes to leaving gay rights to the states. I guess Brother Pat can hope none of them watch CNN — or read this blog.