How delightful it would be if the Massachusetts Supreme Court could be given credit for President Bush’s second term, if its holding that same-sex marriage is embedded in the Commonwealth’s constitution had really drawn a flood of evangelical Christians to the polls and halted an otherwise irresistible Kerry juggernaut. That would be enough irony to last the rest of the decade.
Alas, it isn’t true. One doesn’t need statistical analysis to disprove it, only a little knowledge of the evangelical and fundamentalist species of Christianity, about which the average left-wing commentator (or right winger, for that matter) knows as much as he does about Martians. I’m no expert either, but, though not an evangelical or even a Protestant myself, I have some acquaintance with evangelicals and don’t find the forces that affect their voting behavior impenetrably mysterious.
The reason why so many in this group routinely stay away from the polls isn’t because they are ignorant, pace the comforting secularist stereotype, but because they take seriously St. Augustine’s dichotomy between the City of God and the City of Man, not regarding themselves as full-fledged citizens of the latter. They are well aware that it allows and encourages abominations – what else would one expect? They do not believe that it can be changed in any essential way by changing its political leaders. Hence, no-fault divorce, legal abortion and other social issues have not in the past spurred them to vote. It isn’t plausible to assert that the less palpable threat of state recognition of same-sex “marriage” would motivate them more strongly.
What motivated them this year was exactly what moved a lot of other voters: the threat of Islamic terrorism. However little one may care about the internal affairs of the secular polity, responding to a direct attack is a different matter. St. Augustine himself took part in the defense of his earthly city against the Vandals.
That first time evangelical voters strongly preferred President Bush to Senator Kerry is no wonder. Like the majority of other Americans, they considered him more resolute as a commander-in-chief. That their primary issue was the conduct of the war (which many may well have seen as a matter of “moral values”; isn’t every issue at some level a moral one?) is shown by their failure to boost Republican candidates further down the ticket. The GOP lost a batch of state legislative chambers and had no net House or Senate pickup outside the South. In those contests, the Democrats’ new voters, who are convinced that all Republicans are fascists, were more efficacious.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court did not, then, swing the Presidential election. The impact of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was more limited and predictable: A large number of states enacted constitutional amendments to head off any similar action by their own courts. The effect will to present a new obstacle to advocates of same-sex marriage if and when, as they claim to anticipate, public opinion turns in their favor. If they really believe that the future is on their side, the clever follow-up to Goodridge would have been to support a Federal Marriage Amendment. Pro-homosexual lawmakers could easily have ensured passage of a version that restricted only courts, not legislatures. Congressional action to send such an amendment to the states for ratification would have killed enthusiasm for state constitutional changes and thus left same-sex marriage proponents in a better long-run position than they occupy now. Like many zealots, however (including some on the Right), they were quite incapable of discerning their own strategic interests.
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