Karl Rove spoke to students on Monday at Choate Rosemary Hall, the well-known Connecticut prep school. One student challenged him on gay marriage. He couldn’t seem to give a good reason for banning it. Go figure.
[Marla] Spivak, a senior from Hamden, was one of the students invited to have lunch earlier with Rove. That left her somewhat emboldened as she stood before the crowd and asked Rove to explain how giving gay people the right to marry would endanger other people.
Rove took issue with the way the first gay marriages came about, through the Massachusetts Supreme Court. An issue as important as the definition of marriage should be resolved by a legislature or a referendum, not a court, he said.
Gay couples could gain the legal rights of married couples through legislation without actually getting married, he said.
But wouldn’t creating a separate body of legislation for gay people be creating a separate but equal system, a step back?, Spivak asked.
Rove replied with an answer about Mormons changing their views on marriage to conform with the nation’s laws.
Spivak kept pressing. “You never actually answered, how does it threaten anyone?” she asked.
Rove asked, what’s the compelling reason to throw out 5,000 years of understanding the institution of marriage as between a man and a woman?
What, Spivak countered, was the compelling reason for society to allow interracial relationships when they had once been outlawed.
Then Rove invoked the Declaration of Independence before Spivak interjected that its reference to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” seemed to support her claims.
Their verbal pingpong match tapered off after Rove brought up polygamy and Spivak acknowledged that she did not know enough about polygamy to answer. Rove later asked when she planned to run for political office.
Karl Rove, of all people, couldn’t come up with a good reason for banning gay marriage.
I love this Marla Spivak. I’ve sometimes fantasized about debating some of these people face to face. She was able to do it and didn’t let him off the hook (at least until it came to the lame argument about polygamy).
You go, girl!
Karl Rove should know better than to claim that Mormons changed their views on marriage to conform to the nation’s laws.
A high school student in Utah, I assume he would have had the same required Utah history class I had–the one that explains how, in the 1890s, Mormon leaders officially banned polygamy so Utah could become a state. But then they continued to practice it for the next 20, 30, even 40 years, often but not always hiding from federal charges.
I just finished a great book that touched on this, by the way: Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918 by Jeffrey Nichols
Rove’s christo-nazi argument mostly likely has another hole other than the “life, liberty and persuit of happiness” issue: 5000 years of heterosexual-only marriages??? Not true.
There’s a growing body of evidence that in pre-Plague Europe (via church records) that homosexual marriages did exist.
And what about the Hellenistic era ?
That all said, historical precedence rarely indicates what is true or just. The Christian Right’s argument is very weak and has little to do with good reasoning skills.
rob@egoz.org