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01/03/2011
Biden misspoke, says she who misspeaks every time she purports to 'protect marriage'
"I think the country's evolving, and I think there's an inevitability for a national consensus on gay marriage."
-Vice President Joe Biden
You may agree with the Vice President's thoughts, as most of us who read the writing on the marriage equality wall surely do. You may strongly disagree with the Veep, as those who make their careers out of anti-gay bias surely do (at least publicly, to their donors). Or you may think there's a little more nuance to be had, with the consensus being inevitable, yes, but on a more piecemeal rather than national scale.
Though regardless of where you stand, you cannot fairly call Biden's statement a misrepresentation, a slip of a tongue, or a "big f---in'" mistake. And you certainly can't fairly call his opinion a "gaffe." Not this time.
Yet "gaffe" is the exact label that Maggie Gallagher and NOM are trying to attach to V.P. Biden's words:
Biden's Gay Marriage Gaffe
On Bill O'Reilly's show last week, Democratic pollster Doug Schoen responded to VP Joe Biden's strange and silly claim that a "national consensus" is developing in favor of gay marriage.
"The only place there's a 'consensus,'" Schoen contended, "is among the hard core left of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden was reaching out to that constituency and throwing them a bone." THIS ENTRY WAS WRITTEN BY MAGGIE [NOM Blog]
Silly, Maggie? Well, let's see: We currently have five marriage states and the District of Columbia. We fairly earned a couple more states, only to have them rolled back by unfair majority tyranny (votes whose righteousness will crumble under the weight of history). Plus we could have a couple more states via legislative action by the time the ball drops on this year. Not bad, considering we had a big fat goose eggs of states less than a decade ago.
And oh yea -- there's also that big Prop 8 trial where we've already had one fantastic victory. The continued legal reality of that ongoing trial is one where our side drastically outpaces the other side's non-water-holding arguments. Heck, even anti-LGBT groups like Liberty Counsel have called out the Prop 8 proponents' defense for being misguided and feeble.
Then there's also the polling, which turns more pro-equality every day that a new American citizen blows out his or her 18th birthday candles. This young support, when coupled with unprecedented exposure to LGBT people's lives and loves in mainstream media, is very likely to hold strong as the calendar progresses. Because young people know us LGBTs as humans, not as the Falwell-ian characters of some Baby Boomer fairy tale. That's gonna matter.
So it may strike the "marriage protection" crowd as annoying or unfortunate or dangerous to the bottom line -- but it's certainly not "silly" to look at the reality of marriage in this country and see one decided trajectory! The gaffe here does not belong to forward thinking folks like Biden, but rather to those who think that dwindling public opinion and past historical missteps somehow equal merit, and that anti-gay regression is going to replace pro-gay "Glee" as 2011's hottest trend.