From NY
Times
By Frank Rich
He never promised them the Rose Garden. But that’s where America’s
self-appointed defenders of family values had expected President Bush to take
his latest stand against same-sex marriage last week. In the end, without
explanation, the event was shunted off to a nondescript auditorium in the
Executive Office Building, where the president spoke for a scant 10 minutes at
the non-prime-time hour of 1:45 p.m. The subtext was clear: he was embarrassed
to be there, a constitutional amendment “protecting” marriage was a loser,
and he feared being branded a bigot. “As this debate goes forward, every
American deserves to be treated with tolerance and respect and dignity,” Mr.
Bush said.
That debate died on the floor of the Senate less than 48 hours later, when
the amendment went down to an even worse defeat than expected. Washington
instantly codified the moral: a desperate president at rock bottom in the
polls went through the motions of a cynical and transparent charade to rally
his base in an election year. Nothing was gained — even the president of the
Family Policy Network branded Mr. Bush’s pandering a ruse — and no harm
was done.
Except to gay people. That’s why the president went out of his way to
talk about “tolerance” at this rally, bizarrely held on the widely marked
25th anniversary of the first mention of an AIDS
diagnosis in a federal report. Mr. Bush knew very well that his participation
in this tired political stunt, while certain to have no effect on the
Constitution, could harm innocent Americans.
When young people hear repeatedly that gay couples aspiring to marital
commitment are “undermining the moral fabric of the country, that stuff
doesn’t wash off,” says Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force. Most concretely, the Washington ruckus trickles down into sweeping
assaults on gay partners’ employee benefits and parental rights at the state
level, as exemplified by a broadly worded referendum on the Virginia ballot
this fall outlawing any kind of civil union. Had Mr. Bush really believed that
his words had no consequences, he would have spoken in broad daylight at the
White House and without any defensive touchy-feely bromides about
“tolerance.”
Mr. Bush prides himself on being tolerant — and has hundreds of photos of
himself posing with black schoolkids to prove it. But his latest marriage
maneuver is yet another example of how his presidency has been an enabler of
bigots, and not just those of the “pro-family” breed.
The stars are in alignment for a new national orgy of rancor because
Americans are angry. The government has failed to alleviate gas prices, the
economic anxieties of globalization or turmoil in Iraq. Two-thirds of
Americans believe their country is on the wrong track. The historical response
to that plight is a witch hunt for scapegoats on whom we can project our rage
and impotence. Gay people, though traditionally handy for that role, aren’t
the surefire scapegoats they once were; support for a constitutional marriage
amendment, ABC News found, fell to 42 percent just
before the Senate vote. Hence the rise of a juicier target: Hispanics. They
are the new gays, the foremost political piñata in the election year of 2006.
As has not been the case with gay civil rights, Mr. Bush has taken a humane
view of immigration reform throughout his political career. Some of this is
self-interest; he wants to cater to his business backers’ hunger for cheap
labor and Karl Rove’s hunger for Hispanic voters. But Mr. Bush has always
celebrated and promoted immigrants and never demonized them — at least in
Texas. In the White House, he sidelined immigration after 9/11, then backed
away from a “guest worker” proposal when his party balked in 2004. After
bragging about his political capital upon re-election, he squandered it on
Iraq and a quixotic campaign to privatize Social Security. Now Congress has
acted without him, turning immigration reform into a deadlocked culture war
not unlike the marriage amendment. A draconian federal law is unlikely, but
the damage has been done: the ugly debate has in itself generated a backlash
against a vulnerable minority.
Most Americans who are in favor of stricter border enforcement are not
bigots. Far from it. But some politicians and other public figures see an
opportunity to foment hate and hysteria for their own profit. They are
embracing a nativism and xenophobia that recall the 1920’s, when a State
Department warning about an influx of “filthy” and “unassimilable”
Jews from Eastern Europe led to the first immigration quotas, or the 1950’s
heyday of Operation Wetback, when illegal Mexican workers were hunted down and
deported.
“What a repellent spectacle,” the Fox News anchor Brit Hume said when
surveying masses of immigrant demonstrators, some of them waving Mexican
flags, in April. Hearing of a Spanish version of “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, introduced a Senate
resolution calling for the national anthem to be sung only in English. There
was no more point to that gratuitous bit of grandstanding than there was to
the D.O.A. marriage amendment. Or more accurately, both had the same point:
stirring up animosity against a group that can be branded an enemy of
civilization as we know it.
The most pernicious demagogues on immigration often invoke national
security as their rationale, but no terrorist has been known to enter the
United States from Mexico. Even the arguments about immigrants’ economic
impact are sometimes a smokescreen for a baser animus. As John B. Judis of The
New Republic documented in his account of Arizona’s combustible immigration
politics, the dominant fear in that border state has less to do with
immigrants stealing jobs (which are going begging in construction and
agriculture) than with their contaminating the culture through “Mexicanization.”
It’s the same complaint that’s been leveled against every immigrant group
when the country’s in this foul a mood.
That mood was ratcheted up last week by the success of Brian Bilbray’s
strategy in winning the suburban San Diego House seat vacated by the jailed
Duke Cunningham. Mr. Bilbray, a card-carrying lobbyist, was thought to be
potentially vulnerable even in a normally safe Republican district. But by his
own account, his campaign took off once he started hitting the single issue of
immigration, taking a hard line far to the right of the president who endorsed
him. Mr. Bilbray goes so far as to call for the refusal of automatic
citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants — a repudiation of the
14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to ensure citizenship to everyone
born in the United States.
His victorious campaign set a tone likely to be embraced by other
Republicans fearful of a rout in 2006. The election year is still young, and
we haven’t seen the half of this vitriol yet. Some politicians, like Senator
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, are equal-opportunity bigots: when he isn’t
calling for the Senate to declare English the national language and demanding
that immigrants be quizzed on the Federalist Papers (could he pass?), he is
defending marriage by proclaiming that in his family’s “recorded
history” there has never been “any kind of homosexual relationship.”
(Any bets on how long before someone unearths the Inhofes’ unrecorded
history?) Vernon Robinson, a Republican Congressional candidate challenging
the Democratic incumbent Brad Miller in North Carolina, has run an ad warning
that “if Miller had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for
illegal aliens and homosexuals.”
The practitioners of such scare politics know what they’re up to.
That’s why they so often share the strange psychological tic of framing
their arguments in civil-rights speak. The Minuteman Project, the vigilante
brigade stoking fears of an immigration Armageddon, quotes Gandhi on its Web
site; its founder, Jim Gilchrist, has referred to his group as
“predominantly white Martin Luther Kings.” On a Focus on the Family radio
show, James Dobson and the White House press secretary, Tony Snow, positioned
the campaign to deny gay civil rights as the moral equivalent of L.B.J.’s
campaign to extend civil rights. James Sensenbrenner, the leading House
Republican voice on immigration policy, likened those who employ illegal
immigrants to “the 19th-century slave masters” that “we had to fight a
civil war to get rid of.” For that historical analogy to add up, you’d
have to believe that Africans voluntarily sought to immigrate to America to be
slaves. Whether Mr. Sensenbrenner is out to insult African-Americans or is
merely a fool is a distinction without a difference in this volatile political
climate.
Mr. Bush is a lame duck, but he still has a bully pulpit. Here is a cause
he has professed to believe in since he first ran for office in Texas, and
it’s threatening to boil over in an election year. Imagine if he exercised
leadership and called out those who trash immigrants rather than merely
mouthing homilies about tolerance and dignity.
Tolerance and dignity are already on life-support in this debate. If the
president doesn’t lead, he will have helped relegate Hispanics to the same
second-class status he has encouraged for gay Americans. Compassionate
conservatism, R.I.P.
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