Dan Gilgoff: August 2007 Archives

In 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court gave President Bush a gift by making the Bay State the first to legalize gay marriage; The ruling enraged social conservatives nationwide and led to a wave of state ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage that helped drive support for Bush’s reelection, including in all-important Ohio. Yesterday, a judge in Polk County, Iowa gave Mitt Romney a similar, if more modest gift, striking down the state’s gay marriage ban. Already the frontrunner in Iowa polls, the ruling offers Romney another chance to distinguish himself from Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson by trumpeting his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. That’s likely to be a major draw for religious conservatives, who, depending on the ultimate fate of the ruling—county officials are expected to appeal to the state Supreme Court—may be provoked into playing an even bigger role than usual in the Iowa caucuses.

The first presidential candidate to react the ruling, Romney pilloried “unelected judges trying to redefine marriage and disregard the will of the people” and said "This once again highlights the need for a Federal Marriage Amendment to protect the traditional definition of marriage.”

Could advocating divestment in Iran be Obama’s way of making nice to a Jewish constituency that he’s hit some bumps with (watch video), as The Jewish Week speculates? Could be. But God-o-Meter suspects it’s just as likely that toughening up on Iran is Obama’s way of shoring up his foreign policy/tough-on-terror credentials, which have been somewhat bruised by his remarks about striking Pakistan and meeting with foreign dictators.

Fred Thompson has been beat up for giving the impression that he’s an infrequent churchgoer and none-too-devout (including by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson), but now his old pastor is coming to his defense. Andy Brown, Thompson’s childhood pastor at the First Street Church of Christ in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee tells the Los Angeles Times that Thompson underwent a full immersion baptism at age 12—he even dug up the church bulletin from December 15, 1954 to prove it—and that the Thompson family regularly attended services twice a week. While touched by the pastor’s defense, God-o-Meter was ultimately unimpressed, feeling that it would likely remind religious conservatives that, so far, Thompson’s last documented church attendance apparently occurred more than 50 years ago.

For a candidate who winces at getting asked all the “values” questions during the debates, God-o-Meter notes that Huckabee sure has a knack for using values to carve out his niche in the GOP field. When it comes to Mitt Romney, that means calling him a flip-flopper on abortion. When it comes to Fred Thompson, that apparently means calling him soft on gay marriage. Huckabee brags to CBN’s David Brody that Arkansas passed a constitutional gay marriage ban under his governship, then knocks Thompson for declining to support the Federal Marriage Amendment: “[I]t's going to send a signal to conservatives that a person may not really be fully tuned in to the importance of maintaining the integrity and structure of marriage as we know it."

Huckabee knocking Romney’s evolving stances on values issues like abortion rights is nothing new, but comparing him to the flip-flopping John Kerry in an interview with CBN’s David Brody is. The question is whether Huckabee’s latest salvo says more about his own vulnerabilities than about Romney’s. God-o-Meter sees that the former Arkansas Governor is struggling to translate his second place finish in this month’s Ames straw poll into a surge in fundraising or support, while Romney finished first in Ames, is raking in the dough, and leads early primary state polls. Trying to maintain his Mr. Nice Guy image, Huckabee calls Romney a “man of integrity” but “It doesn’t mean the Democrats will lay off of him when it comes to doing the same thing to him in a general election that Republicans did to John Kerry by rolling those pieces of videotape with conflicting statements.”

Romney’s evolving views, Huckabee says, “causes people to say how many different changes of position can one have during an adult’s lifespan as a politician and then be confidant that that person is going to have another epiphany at some point in the future?”

In the same interview, Huckabee says it’s only natural for voters to take Romney’s Mormonism into account. While other candidates have been queasy about doing so, God-o-meter notes that Huckabee has pretty great political cover in doing so: the former Baptist preacher wants voters--particularly the GOP’s evangelical base--to consider his own faith, too: “[E]verybody’s faith, their career, their family, all of those things are part of what helps people to determine whether a candidate is acceptable to them."