News flash: Karl Rove divorced his (second) wife last week. (And tweeted not one word about it.) Now liberal bloggers and Twitterers are having a field day (or hour), noting that the fellow who engineered George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection by pushing anti-gay marriage initiatives in swing states has demonstrated (again) a less than enthusiastic stance regarding the sanctity of marriage.
For those looking for Rove quotes on the importance of heterosexual marriage, here’s a useful tidbit from 2004. The weekend after Bush won reelection, Rove appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and declared that Bush would push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The following exchange ensued:
WALLACE: Explain to me why civil unions can be handled at the state level but marriage can’t.
ROVE: Well, marriage is a very important part of our culture and our society. If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal. And the ideal is that marriage ought to be and should be a union of a man and a woman.
And we cannot allow activist judges to overturn that. We cannot allow activist local elected officials to thumb their nose at 5,000 years of human history and determine that marriage is something else.
No one ever can know what occurs within someone else’s marriage, and people are indeed permitted to preach ideals they cannot meet. (Otherwise, the pulpits would be empty on Sunday morning.) But given that Rove contended that the way to “a hopeful and decent society” is by prohibiting gay marriage and promoting heterosexual marriage, the failure of his own heterosexual marriage is all the more tragic, meaning that this great nation is now one step further from becoming that “hopeful and decent society” Rove and the rest of us yearn for.
You can follow David Corn’s posts and media appearances via Twitter.
