Accidentally Like a Martyr – Warren Zevon
I know it’s not exactly uncharted territory to bash on Michael Steele, but I just can’t resist. He apparently just said the following, as an ‘argument’ against gay marriage:
Now all of a sudden I’ve got someone who wasn’t a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for. So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money.
So now the GOP is anti-marriage? Does Michael Steele really not understand that this supposedly devastating health care effect happens daily to tens of thousands of businesses suffering under the weight of breeder marriages?
Given that his party is ALL ABOUT defending marriage, he clearly can’t mean that. I think this is one of those instances where someone blusters so much that they forget themselves and actually stumble into saying what they really mean. Because this statement – stripped of the preposterous small business angle – amounts to the following: “gay people aren’t people and thus don’t deserve things we treat as customary for straight people.”
Seriously, his argument is that marriage is so bad for the economy that we should only consider allowing it for straight people. Which I’m sure would have worked a decade ago, but even in 2004 when we suffered a major setback on gay marriage, the right had already figured out that defending discrimination wasn’t going to fly. So they couched it in terms of ‘traditional marriage’ and ‘defending the rights of kids to have two parents’ and other assorted nonsense that translated the real issue into code in an effort to nullify the bigotry charges.
Michael Steele, though, sees himself as the Bill Cosby of the 21st century GOP and thus hasn’t noticed any cultural events of the past two decades. So he just says stuff like this and once again shows himself to be the complete buffoon that we’ve come to know and love these past few months.
UPDATE: Reading the actual AP story, it gets even funnier. Steele came up with this argument as “an example of how the party can retool its message to appeal to young voters and minorities.” Because the one thing that young voters and minorities LOVE to hear about is how people who own small businesses matter infinitely more than excluded minorities.
I wonder what it’s like in Michael Steele’s world. Does the rain fall up? Do people bathe in dirt? Is Mr. Rogers a deranged pyschopath?