By Berry Craig
[3-18-04]

Berry Craig is an associate professor of history at Paducah, Ky., Community College and a freelance writer.

Click here for more on gay marriage and all that.

Nobody expected Al Sharpton's run for the Democratic presidential nomination to go anywhere, probably not even Sharpton.

But he made one of the most memorable quips of the primary campaign. When asked about gay marriage, Sharpton said he was less concerned about whom people slept with and more concerned that they'd have a job to go to when they got up in the morning.

The economy has lost 2.2 million jobs since January, 2001, when George W. Bush was inaugurated. He has the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover. That's a big reason Dubya is trailing John Kerry in the polls and probably why the president would rather talk social issues like gay marriage than economic issues like jobs.

Gay marriage is the president's demon du jour. "When Bushes get in trouble, they look around for a politically advantageous bogeyman," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Bush wants a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. "The amendment process has addressed many serious matters of national concern," the president says. "And the preservation of marriage rises to this level of national importance."

I'll admit it, I'm a flaming heterosexual. I'm monogamous. I've been married only once, to the same woman, for 25 years. I'm madly in love with her. We are the proud parents of an 11-year-old son.

But no thanks, Mr. President. Melinda and I don't want your amendment. We don't think a constitutional ban on gay people's getting hitched is necessary for "the preservation of marriage," ours or anybody else's.

Melinda and I are for John Kerry. But we agree with Al Sharpton. Jobs are more important than bunkmates.

Not so, say the culture warriors of the Religious Right. With gay marriage, it's apocalypse now.

Gay marriage will doom us to "moral anarchy" and "sexual anarchy," warns Paul McGuire a right-wing radio talk show host from Los Angeles. He predicts "5,000 years of civilization will be affected."

I teach history. I can't recall any civilization wiped out by gay marriage. Generally, well-armed invaders do the trick.

Randy Thomasson, executive director of Campaign for California Families, frets that if gay marriage is legit, "churches will be forced to marry homosexual couples." Thomasson seems to have forgotten the First Amendment, which separates church and state.

Anyway, divorce is the real threat to marriage. But I can see why Bush isn't pushing an anti-divorce constitutional amendment. Several of his sidekicks in the anti-gay marriage crusade are "family values" Republican politicians who've made more than one trip to the altar or divorce court.

Still I wonder about Dubya. He calls himself a conservative and a born-again Christian. But is he really that het up about gay marriage?

Or is the president desperately trying to shift voter attention away from the lousy economy to the hot-button social issues? Is Bush just engaged in old-fashioned GOP pandering to what one of my western Kentucky union brothers calls "The Three Gs -- God, Guns and Gays"?

Dowd must wonder, too. "Lee Atwater tried to make Americans shudder over the prospect of Willie Horton arriving on their doorstep; and now Karl Rove wants Americans to shudder at the prospect of a lesbian -- Dick Cheney's daughter Mary, say -- setting up housekeeping next door with her ''wife,'" the columnist wrote.

Dowd compared Bush's support for an anti-gay marriage amendment with Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ." The president and the producer "are courting bigotry in the name of sanctity," she wrote. "Opening on two screens: W.'s stigmatizing as political strategy and Mel's stigmata as marketing strategy."

My old Kentucky home is in the Bible Belt. Here in Wildcat country, gay marriage is about as popular as the Tennessee Vols.

Kentucky went for Bush in 2000. But I get the feeling that this time, a lot of Bluegrass State voters are more concerned about the "Three Js -- Jobs, Jobs and Jobs."

That might be why Dubya is going after gays.