Bush's Desperate Attempt to Amend the Constitution

In this week's New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg makes many excellent points about Bush's pathetic attempt to amend the constitution to say marriage is between a man and a woman. As those of us who read know, Bush could care less about gay marriage, just as he could care less about abortion, but he has to kiss up to the right-wing Christian portion of his base in order to win in November. The current issue of Newsweek quotes one of Bush's friends saying, "I don't think he gives a shit about it."

Reporters who cover this issue and Democrats who will be forced to comment on it as the November election nears should keep these facts in mind:

In the past forty years, the definition of marriage has indeed been changed, not by any homosexual master plan but by an epidemic of heterosexual divorce. Marriage is a social good--Bush is certainly right about that--but it has become a disposable good. The causes of divorce are manifold, and they do not include gay marriage. (The state with the nation's lowest divorce rate, Massachusetts, is also the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The day after the Senate vote, USA Today reported that "the number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq." The divorce rate among Army enlisted personnel since 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, is up twenty-eight per cent. For officers the increase is seventy-eight per cent. Perhaps this, rather than the imaginary threat of same-sex marriage, is something that the President should look into.