GOP to LGBT: ‘OMG, You’re Still Here?’
Toward the end of covering the 2012 election, I started to tell friends about the same daydream: Mitt Romney, locked in a room for a week, just sharing opinions about things with no awareness of how events transpired outside. Just a week’s version of honesty, because there was nothing to incentivize being so changeable. Campaigns move pretty fast, after all, and the inviolable pledge of one week becomes the fatal anchor of the next.
As the American political climate moves more or less into a state of Permanent Campaign (Romney ran for president for five years, Rand Paul has for four), this vacillation trend will probably only accelerate among the nation’s more callow candidates. While even the most principled candidate waffles eventually, we’ve been gifted a real brace of chickenshits in the GOP primary. And nothing’s thrown them into the spotlight quite like Republican Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s chickenshit volte-face on his own economic smear-the-queers bill. All that’s left is for you to wonder who has the most potential for blundering numbskullery, but, in a pinch, let’s say it’s Scott Walker.
A little background: Last week Pence signed into law a Religious Freedom Restoration Act for Indiana. The first RFRA was a federal one signed in 1993 by President Clinton, and they have since spread to 20 states, and they are probably all unnecessary given the First Amendment and Civil Rights Acts. Still — perhaps because of the existence of the First Amendment and Civil Rights Acts — they all seem like an anodyne gesture of bipartisan comity, so they keep getting rubber stamped. Unfortunately, Pence and Indiana Republicans capitalized on a decades-long manipulation of “religious freedom” as an excuse to exclude and punish groups they see as immoral or repugnant, leveraging religion’s perquisites to create a bubble of legitimated pre-Civil Rights Era prejudice (and tax avoidance). Only Pence and company went too far: Indiana’s RFRA didn’t just protect religious intolerance from government interference but actually empowered business to discriminate against immoral other folk without risk of civil rights lawsuits. Only, when pressed even to answer yes or no as to whether Pence had just signed a bill that legalized religious discrimination of gays, he sputtered and retreated. Typically, the Onion did the best job of anyone when it came to nailing him to a wall.
Here’s the problem: Almost all the 2016 GOP presidential candidates ran onto the bridge to defend Pence and Indiana Republicans loud enough to be heard in Iowa — then Pence dynamited the thing, sending them crashing to the canyon floor like Wile E. Coyote after holding up two signs reading “I ♥ Jesus” and “Eep.” Each championed the Indiana bill not as discriminatory toward LGBT citizens, which it transparently was, but rather some last desperate bulwark between universally oppressed Christians and predatory gay customers backed up by big gay government. Pence fucked it up.