When makeup artist Erwin Gomez and his partner James
Packard say their “I Dos” next month, Babs
and Jenna will join the wedding party.
Someone should tell the President. Raise the color
code. The girls have gone wild.
This news comes at a fortuitous time. On August 19,
a Superior Court judge in Boston declined to halt enforcement
of a 1913 state law barring out-of-state couples from
coming to the Commonwealth to wed. The law, one might
note as an interesting aside, was originally written
to prevent interracial couples from taking their vows.
Governor Mitt Romney must have let slip an audible sigh
of relief. God forbid his carpetbagged state became
the first in the nation to promote homosexual unions.
The President must have breathed a little easier, too,
to know at last that the government agreed, that his
precious daughters would be saved from the anti-Christian
values of the gays.
Except the Bushie twins were off making their own
plans. Barbara and Jenna represent a trend with the
Republican Party, a trend of saying one thing and
doing another. President Bush had once come out in
favor of states’ rights but, when it came to
the volatile issue of gay marriage, he was suddenly
for an amendment to the Constitution, which would
have removed rights from states and given the central
government more control over personal affairs. None
of this made much sense, unless you considered the
fact that the President was a right-wing lunatic who
was working to make the United States of America the
Protestant States of America.
From tolerance to intolerance, from civil rights
to civil privilege, President Bush has made it his
mission to restore the country to a moment of 1950s
bliss. The nuclear family, the two-car garage, the
white kids watching Leave It to Beaver on the living
room floor, the cars without seatbelts, the busses
without African Americans, the lovely rounded edges
of a society that refused to recognize any kind of
lifestyle that deviated from Father As Breadwinner
and Mother As Housewife.
The President wants to return to a simpler time,
when wealthy white men faced no opposition, when the
power system was clearly defined and strictly adhered
to. To which his daughters have responded mightily.
I would not venture to argue that the Bush twins are
honorable in their decision to attend a gay wedding.
In fact, it is the kind of thing that should not
be qualified one way or another, and I do not doubt
that they have their own reasons for going. But their
decision certainly indicates that the obvious prejudice
propagated by this administration will not be tolerated
for much longer. For every person that agreed with
segregation there were a thousand who did not. And
eventually that resistance blossomed into the kind
of dissent that President Bush has spent four years
trying to crush.
How can the administration continue the fight against
homosexuality when the children of the administration,
the generation that will soon lead this country, has
moved on? The truth is, they can’t. Eventually,
right outsmarts might. And in these final moments,
one can practically picture the blond and buxom Jenna
Bush sticking her tongue out at her father and saying,
“I’m going anyway, Dad. And you can’t
stop me.”
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