RUSH: Okay, folks. Time to go to the phones. If we don’t go to the phones now, I may not remember to go to the phones for the rest of the program because I have barely even gotten started with the stack of stuff.
We’re going to start in Denver. This is Brian. I’m glad you called. I really appreciate your waiting, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are ya?
RUSH: Good. Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I want to soothe a lot of people’s nerves out there about this whole gay marriage situation. First, I want to go ahead and claim I’m probably your biggest gay conservative listener/fan out there.
RUSH: Welcome! Great to have you here. Thank you.
CALLER: There are tons of us who are out there, and I want to just settle some nerves. Not all of us want to get married. Next month’s going to be my 18th anniversary with my partner, and I don’t need a piece of paper or ceremony to prove that we’re in a committed relationship.
RUSH: What about, though, the financial benefits that people accrue by virtue of being married or hospital visitation, that kind of thing? Are you in an official civil union?
CALLER: We’re not. This is the beautiful thing about our relationship. I’m actually self employed and my partner is employed by somebody else. So it actually behooves us to file separately. I’m actually under his insurance right now, and as you know, being self employed, I get so many more tax deductions. We’ve multiplied either doing it together or by ourselves, and filing by ourselves is the smartest thing we can do.
RUSH: Right. Well
CALLER: I just want to make the point I think everybody
RUSH: What do you mean you want to soothe everybody’s feelings?
CALLER: Exactly. Well, I think that they think that 100% of all gays are all for gay marriage and that’s not the truth. There are so many other gay conservatives out there, Rush, that think differently. And I think sometimes if everyone gets in a sour mood thinking that, you know, 100% of the population, and that’s not the fact out there.
RUSH: Well, I don’t think that’s what it is. I mean, I know what your point is, and I appreciate it. The people I know who are opposed to this and by the way, it isn’t very many. Most of the people I know in my circle, Brian, don’t care. They’re so scared about what’s happening in the economy that this social stuff they think is a distraction. And they really don’t care. They’re worried that there isn’t going to be an economy for their grandkids to even have an opportunity to succeed in. That’s what most of the people I know are really, really scared about, what is happening to this economy, what’s going to happen to the private sector, how much it is shrinking, how little opportunity there’s going to be there for not just their grandkids, but their kids, too, depending on their age.
Now, the people I do know who are worried about this, I think the greatest misunderstanding out there among people on the left or even in the homosexual community, is that people who oppose this simply don’t want gays to have a good time or to enjoy it. It’s not that at all. There’s no animus toward homosexuals in this at all among the people who are opposed to it. They are simply worried about words and what they mean and tradition and the purpose of marriage, and it’s a real thing. It’s not a convenience. You know, heterosexuals don’t do it great, the divorce rate’s high. Everybody knows that.
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: But the institution itself has a specific purpose. It evolved for specific reasons and purposes. It doesn’t exist for people to score money or benefits or any of that kind of thing. The people I know are not motivated or animated because they don’t want to let people in the club. It’s not like that at all. It’s that they’re worried about the overall moral and social decay that is happening throughout the culture everywhere.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: They also worry what kind of world are their kids going to grow up and inhabit.
CALLER: Right. And that’s where I always lose the battle with liberals when they start pushing the social agenda. I’m like, listen, I’m not the one that has kids that need to go through college. I’m not the one that’s going to have grandkids.
RUSH: Well, you might. You might adopt some. You never know.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To continue the point I was making with Brian in Denver, a lot of gay people think that opponents to homosexual marriage are a bunch of fuddy duddies who are trying to deny them either a good time or their freedom or their rights or fun or access to benefits or whatever. It’s not that at all, at least not among the people I know who are opposed to this. The people I know who are opposed to it have much larger concerns about the overall culture of the country and the country’s ongoing survival. And not just survival, but thriving. They see traditions and institutions which have withstood the test of time under attack. They see fewer and fewer people willing to stand up and defend them, and they simply worry, you know, is everything going to be torn down and redone. They are worried about this whole concept of freedom.
I had a guy say to me, talking about this, he said, “You know, I’d love to get into Augusta National, but I never will.” He’s acknowledging the fact that it’s a closed club and only certain people get in there. I said to him, “Yeah, but you don’t have a human civil right to get into Augusta National.”
He said, “Why not? How come these guys can come together, build a golf course, have a club and keep me out if I want in? That would make me happy, and I love golf. And from the people I know who are members, I would love them. Why can’t I get in there?”
I said, “Well, it’s not the same thing.”
So he says, “It certainly is. Look it up in the dictionary. Marriage is between a man and a woman and nobody is denying anybody who wants to get married the right to get married. If you’re a man, you get married by marrying a woman.”
This guy was getting all fired up. And he kept coming up with examples like Augusta National. His point was that you don’t get everything you want, even in a free society. That’s not what freedom is, getting everything you want. And I tried to tell him, you know, I was playing devil’s advocate with him. I said, “Well, they say they have no choice in who they love and they want to make it official. They want the world to know and they want all the accoutrements that come with it.”
He said, “Well, okay. What happens next if somebody wants to marry their dog?”
I said, “Well, you make a law that says whatever arrangements are made are between people, human beings.”
“Oh, okay. Well, then what if three people want to get married?”
I said, “Look, I don’t know. I don’t know.” But I understood what he was talking about. A lot of people have no personal animus against gay people at all. It’s instead, you know, a genuine, I don’t know, love/respect for the things they believe define this country as great. They get up every day and they see all this stuff under attack. They see it all under assault. And I think they’re just worried about the survivability of the country. And to which the opponents say, “Well, the country’s changing and you better get with it and understand it because this genie’s not getting put back in the bottle.” And I think that’s right. I don’t care what this court does with this particular ruling, Proposition 8. I think the inertia is clearly moving in the direction that there is going to be gay marriage at some point nationwide.
Now, the political ramifications of that are yet to be known. I mean, the Republican Party, for example, could be looking at its ultimate demise here, depending on how it deals with this. Because they do have multiple millions of voters who are evangelical Christians who on religious grounds alone don’t support homosexual marriage and are not going to support a political party that does. So then the Republicans in that circumstance would be faced, if you were to lose multiple millions of voters over this, they are going to have to replace them somewhere. How do they do it? Do they try to siphon off most of the gay vote that’s going to the Democrats?
Let me give you Dick Cheney as an example. Dick Cheney is on the cutting edge of this. Dick Cheney, as you know, has a gay daughter. Dick Cheney went public in support of gay marriage, what, eight years ago? And the last I looked, those people still hate his guts. They still despise Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney coming out for gay marriage did not soften the opposition or the hatred to him by people in the Democrat Party or on the left a measurable iota. So in terms of the politics of it in the Republican Party, if they think that they can alienate their evangelical base and replace those voters by becoming more hip, modern, with it, what have you, that remains to be seen. Nobody really knows. But the evidence is that they are not going to be able to do that. Anything can change in politics.
I mean, you can say the same thing about immigration. They’re wanting to moderate at the Republican Party executive level on the whole notion of amnesty on the belief that they are not getting Hispanic votes they could get if they were more hip, relevant, more with it, more modern on the whole notion of amnesty and immigration. But if you go back to the 80s when Ronaldus Magnus signed amnesty into law, the Republicans got less. They got fewer, significantly fewer Hispanic votes in the next election after they signed onto amnesty than they got beforehand.
So there are a whole lot of political ramifications with this in addition to the cultural aspects. But the left has succeeded in characterizing everybody who opposes gay marriage as a bigot, and what do bigots do? Bigots hate. And that is a way of making sure that the numbers of people who oppose it are not very large because nobody wants to be called a bigot; nobody wants to be called a racist; nobody wants to be called a hater. So people acquiesce and they just go along with it and they figure things will take care of themselves down the road.
Other people don’t want to leave it up to things taking care of themselves. They want to try to hold on to what they think has defined the country’s greatness that has kept it together. They don’t want it to fall apart. It’s really no more complicated than that. It’s not going to solve any argument about it, but at least it’s, I think, an explanation.
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