Gay Marriage at the State Department

By John Brummett

Talk about an underplayed story. I'm afraid you may have missed it. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice legalized gay marriage a couple of weeks ago.

What happened was that Rice formally announced the appointment of Mark Dybul as the nation's global AIDS ambassador. Dybul is a homosexual man. He was accompanied to the announcement by his homosexual male partner, Jason Claire, who held the Bible for his swearing-in.

Some of you are thoroughly offended already, I'm sure, at the very idea of a gay man swearing on the Bible while his same-sex consort holds that Bible.

Stay seated. You haven't heard anything yet.

In her remarks, Condi Rice said, and I quote: "Thank you. Thank you very much. I am truly honored and delighted to have the opportunity to swear in Mark Dybul as our next Global AIDS Coordinator. I am pleased to do that in the presence of Mark's parents, Claire and Richard; his partner, Jason, and his mother-in-law, Marilyn. You have a wonderful family to support you, Mark, and I know that's always important to us. Welcome."

I direct your attention to the reference to "mother-in-law."

Your mother-in-law is the mother of your spouse. So, no less than our secretary of state, fourth in the line of succession to the presidency, our very emissary to the world, essentially declared Dybul's male homosexual partner his spouse.

This wasn't a liberal Democratic judge in San Francisco or Massachusetts. This was an eminent Bush appointee. And she did it right there in Foggy Bottom, a famously public place in southwestern D.C., with Laura Bush standing by in powerfully passive acquiescence.

This was not far at all from George W.'s White House, where Rice is ever-welcome and highly regarded. Laura, too.

Then Condi flew off to the Far East to try to straighten out that nuclear mess.

Talk about mixed emotions. You don't know which to do first. You could rise in praise of Condi's tolerance and enlightenment. Or you could rise to deplore the Bush administration's breathtaking cynicism and hypocrisy.

Bush and the Republicans rail against the menace of gay marriage to drum up votes from Christian conservatives. Then the president's closest foreign policy adviser publicly declares that a gay man's partner's mother is the gay man's mother-in-law. And the president's wife just stands there like a knot on a log.

The cynical exploitation by Republicans of Christian conservatives - and this gulf between what leading Republicans say and do - began sometime between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Goldwater had no religious element in his insufficient conservative base in 1964, and, truth be known, the charmingly irascible libertarian wouldn't have stood for one. He thought religion ought to be over here and government over there. But conservative leaders realized after Goldwater's drubbing that they needed the religious element to compete.

So, they propped up the pliable Reagan at evangelical religious gatherings to sit with a Hollywood-trained smile as bellowers like James Robison spewed venom about how the "perverts" were going to take over the country unless good Christian men like this Ronald Reagan here got elected.

It's been a tale of deceit ever since. A new book by a former White House aide says Karl Rove would pat evangelical leaders on the back, then laugh at them and call them nuts after they left.

Again, you don't know which to do first, applaud Rove's good judgment or deplore his cynicism.

Dick Cheney's family alone - with the vice president's lesbian adult daughter - is a case study of the hollowness of leading Republicans' vile and cynically manipulative public rhetoric and the compassion and tolerance of their real private lives.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com