When anti-gay bigotry extends to adoption

According to USA Today, "Efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children are emerging across the USA as a second front in the culture wars that began during the 2004 elections over same-sex marriage... Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states..."

Clearly, anti-gay bigots on the right are once again looking for a wedge issue to divide Americans going into this year's mid-term elections. Many of them are no doubt sincere in their bigotry, hoping to cement the status of gays and lesbians as lesser citizens without equal rights and as lesser human beings without dignity, but the electoral angle is obvious, too.

There's been so much bad news for Republicans -- from Iraq to Katrina to DeLay to Abramoff to the NSA scandal -- that the only way for them to win this year may very well be to use yet another "values" issue to vilify the opposition and to mobilize partisans. Given the predictably low voter turnout for mid-term elections, and with Republicans desperate to retain control of Congress, what could tip the balance once again, just as in 2004, is a mobilized religious right eager to show up at the polls in an effort to impose their divisive, bigoted "values" on America.

It's the same old strategy from the same old source: Karl Rove. And it's the two-pronged strategy of labelling the Democrats as soft on national security while using a wedge issue to boost voter turnout just enough to squeak past the opposition.

Knowing this, how will Democrats respond? By showing they're actually quite tough enough on national security -- and by stressing their alternative to Bush's incompetence on everything from Iraq to Katrina to America's ports. By discussing core domestic issues like health care and education in real and substantive ways, not just empty slogans like "No Child Left Behind" and insane ideological efforts like social security privatization. And hopefully, too, by standing up for justice both at home and abroad -- for the poor and the sick and the hungry and the homeless, for the abused and the war-ravaged, and, in this case, for gays and lesbians who only want to give unwanted children a good home.

It is time to repel this bigotry. Once and for all.

(See also Shakespeare's Sister (who is justifiably angry), The Next Hurrah (with a great state-by-state round-up of anti-gay legislation), Preemptive Karma (Republicans have been "so craptastically lousy at governance"), and Norbizness ("wanton, fundamentalist cruelty" -- well put).