[Vision2020] Excluded From Inclusion

[Art Deco]

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September 1, 2012
Excluded From Inclusion By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

Tampa, Fla.

WHAT the Republicans painstakingly constructed here was meant to look like
the biggest of tents. And still they couldn’t spare so much as a sleeping
bag’s worth of space for the likes of me.

Women were welcomed. During the prime evening television hours, the
convention stage was festooned with them, and when they weren’t at the
microphone, they were front and center in men’s remarks. Paul Ryan and Mitt
Romney both gushed about their moms in tributes as tactical as they were
teary.

Latinos were plentiful and flexed their Spanish — “En América, todo es
posible,” said Susana Martinez, the New Mexico governor — despite an
“English First” plank in the party’s regressive platform.

And while one preconvention poll suggested that roughly zero percent of
African-Americans support Romney, Republicans found several prominent black
leaders to testify for him. Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of
state, delivered what will surely be remembered as the convention’s most
stirring and substantive remarks, purged of catcalls and devoid of slickly
rendered fibs.

But you certainly didn’t see anyone openly gay on the stage in Tampa. More
to the point, you didn’t hear mention of gays and lesbians. Scratch that:
Mike Huckabee, who has completed a ratings-minded transformation from
genial pol to dyspeptic pundit, made a derisive reference to President
Obama’s support for same-sex marriage. We were thus allowed a fleeting
moment inside the tent, only to be flogged and sent back out into the cold.

It was striking not because a convention or political party should make a
list of minority groups and dutifully put a check mark beside each. That’s
an often hollow bow to political correctness.

It was striking because the Republicans went so emphatically far, in terms
of stagecraft and storytelling, to profess inclusiveness, and because we
gays have been in the news rather a lot over the last year or so, as the
march toward marriage equality picked up considerable velocity. We’re a
part of the conversation. And our exile from it in Tampa contradicted the
high-minded “we’re one America” sentiments that pretty much every speaker
spouted.

It also denied where the country is so obviously headed and where so many
Republicans have quietly arrived. To wit: David Koch, the billionaire
industrialist who has funneled millions into efforts to elect Romney and
other Republicans, told a Politico reporter who caught up with him in Tampa
and asked him about gay rights, “I believe in gay marriage.” Reminded that
Romney didn’t, Koch said, “Well, I disagree with that.”

Romney exemplifies the party’s cowardice on this front, its continued
deference to the religious extremists who get king-size beds and
down-stuffed duvets in the tent.

Back during his 1994 Senate campaign in Massachusetts, he wrote, “If we are
to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians
a mainstream concern.” He never endorsed same-sex marriage, but he gave no
inkling that he’d swerve rightward to the positions he articulated during
the Republican primaries and currently holds. He favors a constitutional
amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman. He opposes even civil
unions.

“I believe that marriage has been defined the same way for literally
thousands of years by virtually every civilization in history and that
marriage is, by its definition, a relationship between a man and woman,” he
said earlier this year — a statement of curious sweep, given his religious
ancestry. Little more than a hundred years ago, Mormons defined marriage as
a relationship between a man and multiple women. That was the tradition.
They ultimately decided that a new approach was necessary — and better.
That’s all that those of us who advocate marriage equality are asking
Romney and other political leaders to do.

People who know Romney well tell me that he’s not in the least judgmental
about gays and lesbians and that he’s more or less accepting of them. That
may be so, but it makes him, like others in his party, guilty of a kind of
doublespeak, their private sentiments at odds with their public stances.

Steve Levitan, one of the creators of the television comedy “Modern
Family,” dared Ann Romney last week to put her public advocacy where her
viewing habits are. After she named his show, which spotlights a gay couple
with an adopted child, as her favorite, he Tweeted: “We’ll offer her the
role of officiant at Mitch & Cam’s wedding. As soon as it’s legal.”

Several gay Republicans with whom I spoke in Tampa said that the
near-complete absence of any talk onstage about gays and lesbians was in
fact a hopeful sign that the party’s extremists on gay issues had lost the
war to moderates. At least gays and lesbians weren’t being cast in a
negative light, as a way of riling the worst of the base.

“Our messaging within the party has been: if you can’t say anything nice,
don’t say anything at all,” said R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director
of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay advocacy group.

But that’s not progress enough. Silence does nothing for gay and lesbian
teenagers racked with self-doubt and anxiety about what the world has in
store. Or for committed same-sex couples who lack the legal protections
that their straight counterparts have. Silence is a stalling tactic, and
silence is a cop-out.

On the convention stage in Tampa, where estrogen was platinum and melanin
was gold, Republicans spoke eloquently about a country that valued every
person’s worth and was poised to reward each person’s dreams. Those words
would have carried much more weight if coupled with even a glancing
recognition of gay and lesbian Americans. Instead speakers tacitly let the
party’s platform do the talking. It calls for the kind of constitutional
amendment that Romney now supports.

Sorry, Governor Martinez, you’re wrong. Todo no es posible. Not if you’re
gay and live in Wisconsin (Ryan’s home state), Michigan (Romney’s) or 42
others and want to get married. Not if you’re gay and listened to all the
soaring oratory in Tampa with the wish for one sentence or syllable of
reassurance that the tent stretched all the way to you.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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