There are now three official occupants of the GOP presidential candidate car - Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio - and all of them are anti-gay. Ted Cruz opposes all gay rights, Paul has stated that gays can have "contracts" not marriage, and Rubio opposes marriage equality and even withdrew immigration reform support when a provision was added to the bill that would allow gay spouses to have the same immigration rights as foreign heterosexual spouses of American citizens. Despite the shift in popular support for marriage equality, all of the GOP candidates remain shameless whores to the Christofascists. A piece in Salon reminds of just who hostile Rubio is to LGBT Americans. Here are highlights:
On June 11, 2013, the Russian parliament unanimously passed legislation prohibiting the dissemination of so-called gay propaganda, by which the Kremlin’s retrograde conservatives meant such heresies as the notions that gay and straight relationships are equally valuable, or that gay people enjoy any rights that the state is bound to respect. . . . Amid mounting anti-gay atrocities, record numbers of LGBT Russians sought to flee the country.
The same day that the Russian parliament declared war on gay citizens, Sen. Marco Rubio issued a headline-grabbing proclamation: The Florida Republican said he would jettison the immigration reform legislation he’d spent months helping craft if it included an amendment from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., allowing gay Americans to sponsor their foreign spouses for permanent residency — a right long afforded to heterosexual citizens.
“If this bill has in it something that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth, it kills the bill,” Rubio told Fox News personality Andrea Tantaros on her radio show. “I’m gone, I’m off it, and I’ve said that repeatedly.
[I]f you’ll think back to the political climate of mid-2013, you’ll recall that Rubio was then regarded as a potentially salvific figure for his party; following the GOP’s 2012 drubbing, which featured a disastrous performance among Latinos, this son of Cuban immigrants looked poised to emerge as the face of a more inclusive party. His work on immigration reform was part of Rubio’s effort to lead a Republican rebrand, and now he was willing to throw it all away simply to strike a blow for anti-gay bigotry?
By June 2013, of course, Rubio had come to the painful realization that his immigration efforts were alienating the hardcore conservative base of his party . . . So perhaps the ambitious freshman senator was in search of any excuse he could find to backtrack on legislation that was anathema to the right-wing voters he’d need to placate in three years’ time.
The good news is that Rubio has seemingly alienated the Tea Party set, those who support immigration reform, and many others. One can hope that his campaign will crash and burn as he prostitutes himself to the ugliest elements of the GOP base.
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