The two leading Republican presidential hopefuls are outlining competing visions for what they see as the future of same-sex marriage if they are elected next November.
Mitt Romney, once considered the unchallenged frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination, has outlined a proposal that calls for a three-tier system that specifically defines marriage for LGBT persons.
Speaking to the Boston Herald newspaper, the former Massachusetts governor laid out a plan for a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution that includes maintaining marriage rights for heterosexual couples, recognizing existing same-sex unions, and barring recognition of future same-sex marriages.
Said Romney, 64, with respect to his plan: “I think it would keep intact those marriages which had occurred under the law but maintain future plans based on marriage being between a man and a woman,” Romney said.
California’s 2008 passage of its Marriage Protection Act — Proposition 8 — which barred same-sex marriage, led to similar conditions in the Golden State: an end to future weddings between gay couples, along with recognition of the 18,000 same-sex unions that had already been performed.
The aspiring Matchmaker-in-Chief’s plan for a Federal mandate contradicts his earlier political position. In 1994, during his unsuccessful challenge to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Romney said that “the authorization of marriage on a same-sex basis falls under state jurisdiction.”
Romney’s proposal has also been criticized by members of his party. On December 15, the Log Cabin Republicans released a statement calling the plan “unworkable, unnecessary, and entirely foreign to the United States’ founding principle of equality under the law.”
The group’s Executive Director, R. Clarke Cooper, wrote that “Governor Romney is contorting himself into a pretzel trying to avoid the simplest solution to a purely political problem. The best way to strengthen all families is to grant equal access to civil marriage for all couple regardless of their orientation.”
Meanwhile, the man who has emerged as the most serious threat to Romney’s nomination aspirations has taken a completely different turn on the issue, with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich singing the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) “marriage pledge,” also on December 15.
NOM’s pledge states that candidates will work to support an amendment to the Constitution barring same-sex marriage, as well as “establish[ing] a presidential commission on religious liberty to investigate and document reports of Americans who have been harassed or threatened for exercising key civil rights to organize, to speak, to donate, or to vote for marriage, and to propose new protections, if needed.”
According to NOM’s website, the pledge also requires that, if elected president, the candidate will appoint federal judges and an attorney general who “will respect the original meaning” of the Constitution’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.
Gingrich’s own marriage history includes two divorces, each of which reportedly ended after the 67-year-old former Georgia congressman’s infidelities, and while each of his wives was seriously ill. He married his third wife, former congressional aide Callista Bisek, in 2000 after a six-year extramarital affair he has acknowledged.
In 2010, Esquire.com reported that when asked how he could act unfaithfully towards two seriously ill wives and still give a speech on family values, Gingrich replied that “people need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
Gingrich’s half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, a gay woman and LGBT rights activist, said during an interview with MSNBC that her older half-brother “is definitely on the wrong side of history when it comes to [gay rights] issues.” Gingrich-Jones says that she will support President Obama’s reelection in 2012.