The Politics of Fear

On June 5th, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the world's first AIDS diagnosis, President Bush called upon ''community leaders, scholars, family organizations, religious leaders, Republicans, Democrats and independents'' to join him in the Old Executive Office Building for a solemn announcement. Would the ''compassionate conservative'' mark this day with a moment of silence for the 500,000 Americans lost to the epidemic? Or perhaps, at long last, cooperate with global efforts to fight AIDS in Africa?

No, Bush had something very different in mind: endorsing an anti-gay bill that had no chance of passing in order to shore up his flagging support among evangelicals. ''You are here because you strongly support a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman,'' the president told his handpicked guests, ''and I am proud to stand with you.'' Americans, he declared, had reached a ''consensus'' against gay marriage.

In fact, anti-gay sentiments among voters are dwindling almost as rapidly as Bush's approval rating. Two years ago, when the president first proposed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, sixty percent of Americans supported his position. Today, according to the latest polls, that number has fallen to forty-two percent. In fact, Bush's move sparked opposition even among those closest to him. Laura Bush urged her husband not to use gay marriage ''as a campaign tool.'' The vice president's daughter Mary Cheney -- who joined Bush at his 2004 inauguration with her lesbian life partner, Heather Poe -- slammed the president for ''writing discrimination into the Constitution.'' Even Bush himself didn't have his heart in the fight: A friend of the family told Newsweek that the president's decision was ''purely political. I don't think he gives a shit about it.'' When the Senate debated the issue two days later, the proposed amendment received only forty-nine of the sixty-seven votes needed to pass -- just one more than it received in 2004, despite the fact that the GOP has gained four seats in the interim.

Why would the president throw himself behind a measure that he knew was opposed by most voters, let alone one that stood no chance of passing in the Senate? The answer lies in the political calculus facing Republicans in the midterm elections this fall. Bush's approval rating has not only fallen to a historic low among voters at large since he was re-elected -- it has plunged twenty-two percent among white evangelicals. ''The guy's dropping everywhere, but, Jesus -- that's the biggest drop of them all,'' says veteran political handicapper Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report. ''If he wants to stem his losses, he has to find something other than the war in Iraq and Katrina and gas prices and budget deficits for his voters to focus on.''

Indeed, Bush's attack on same-sex marriage was so transparently political that even the nation's most virulently anti-gay activists recognized the president's insincerity. ''He's some kind of demagogue without any core values whatsoever,'' says the Rev. Fred Phelps, the reactionary, anti-homosexual crusader behind the infamous ''God Hates Fags'' campaign. ''His only dominant value is expediency. He's only doing this because he's losing what core support he had, and anyone with half a brain can see it. He's shameless.''

When it comes to the politics of distraction, Bush's decision to stoke fears among religious conservatives about gay sex is part of a historical pattern among Republicans. In fact, the last time the party fought a battle over ''traditional'' marriage -- attempting to uphold state bans on interracial marriage during the 1960s -- the political landscape was eerily similar. Sixteen states had laws on the books outlawing marriage between whites and blacks, and seventy percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage. Those are almost precisely the numbers that Bush marshaled to justify his call to ban gay marriage. ''Nineteen states have held referendums to amend their state constitutions to protect the traditional definition of marriage,'' the president observed. ''In every case, the amendments were approved by decisive majorities, with an average of seventy-one percent.'' The president also flashed the same kind of scorn that was heaped on the Supreme Court when it struck down bans on interracial marriage in 1967: ''Unfortunately, this consensus is being undermined by activist judges and local officials who have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage.''

''The same rhetoric that's being used today against the gay community was used then against interracial couples,'' says Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who elevated the struggle for marriage equality to the national stage by presiding over nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings in early 2004. ''Nothing has changed. It is the same playbook, and it is as shameful today as it was then.''

The turning point from race-baiting to gay-baiting came in 1984, when Jesse Helms framed his Senate campaign -- then the most expensive in history -- as a struggle between ''the patriotic'' and ''the homosexuals.'' At the time, emotions against integration and busing were on the decline in the South, and Republicans needed a new scare issue to frighten voters. ''One of Helms' political architects told me at the time that it was not about ?values' -- it was about provoking a visceral, gut-level response,'' says Bob Hall, who studied the campaign for the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina. ''It's not rational -- it's Snakes on a Plane.'' Helms, he adds, ''proved the value of gay-baiting in a campaign -- even against a moderate opponent. He helped embed it into the culture of the right-wing political operatives.''

Gay-bashing has been part of the GOP's political bread and butter ever since. ''The gay issue has taken the place of the race issue for the Republican right,'' says Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. ''This is true not only in the South but nationwide.''

Bush learned the electoral power of homophobia early in his political career. In his bid to unseat Ann Richards as governor of Texas in 1994, Bush was aided by a Karl Rove whisper campaign implying that Richards was a little too cozy with gays on her staff. In the infamous South Carolina primary that knocked Sen. John McCain out of the 2000 presidential race, Bush got a boost from Phelps, who plastered the state with a cover of a gay publication that had endorsed McCain. And in 2004, Rove coordinated a campaign to boost evangelical turnout by placing initiatives to ban gay marriage on the ballot in eleven battleground states.

''Homophobia is replacing the set of flag and race issues of a generation ago,'' says Kevin Phillips, the one-time Nixon strategist who coined the term ''Southern Strategy'' to describe the GOP's leverage of racial prejudice to wrest the South from Democratic control. ''It's the last refuge of the scoundrel.''