Romney Continues to Get Blasted Over Anti-Gay Marriage Stance

As noted yesterday, Mitt Romney continues to receive negative fall out from his encounter with a married gay Vietnam veteran in New Hampshire. Among Romney's excuses for opposing same sex marriage was a claim that the Founding Fathers did not support it. This fall back to "originalsim" is the standard ploy utilized by the GOP when common sense tells you that the Equal Protection Clause of the U. S. Constitution demands a result not to the GOP's liking. One of the fallacies in this effort is that the 14th Amendment wasn't even written by the Founders. Perhaps an accurate history lesson is required. A piece in the New York Times blasts Romney for engaging in this bull shit excuse making. Here are highlights:

Yesterday in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney gave the laziest possible explanation for why it’s OK to deny same-sex couples the right to marry: Originalism. . . . . . After an intense exchange [with Vietnam vet Bob Garon], Mr. Romney said that “at the time the Constitution was written it was pretty clear that marriage is between a man and a woman, and I don’t believe the Supreme Court has changed that.”

Republicans tend to go on about original intent when a constitutional question comes up especially if they may not be comfortable with the underlying issue. But it’s also ridiculous.

The word “marriage” isn’t in the Constitution. It’s simply not mentioned. And whether the Constitution does — or does not —protect gay couples against state-sanctioned discrimination has nothing to do with whether the framers did — or did not — anticipate that one day men would want to marry other men, and women marry other women.

When the Supreme Court invalidated Virginia’s miscegenation law in Loving v. Virginia, the justices did not scrutinize James Madison’s diaries to see whether he would have approved of interracial marriage. (If they had, interracial marriage would probably still be illegal in some places.) Nor did they confine themselves to the parts of the Constitution that Madison and the other framers wrote, reaching instead to the 14th amendment, adopted in 1868. Virginia’s law, the justices determined, violated the 14th amendment’s due process clause because it interfered with “the fundamental freedom” of marriage.

[I]t’s dangerous to resort to originalism when it comes to civil rights. When the Constitution was written, it was pretty clear that only men and women were marrying each other. It was also pretty clear that white people could own black people, and that women did not have the right to vote.

Sadly, I suspect that many in the Christianist/Tea Party base of the GOP would like to return to the original status - slavery for blacks (or at least disenfranchisement) and restrictions on the rights of women.