He's Just Plain Right

Andrew Sullivan says it all today. I've cut and pasted the whole day's posts.

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THE WAR AND THE CONSTITUTION: It behooves me to wrestle with a question that many of you have asked me about. I have long been a strong supporter of this president's extraordinary leadership in the war on terror. He has made some mistakes, but I stand by his broader record entirely. This isn't because of some personal liking for Bush (although I've never been able to loathe him). My support for the war is inextricable from my love for America. When this country was attacked, like many others, I was distraught. I was enraged because America's promise of a new world had been threatened by a murderous gang of theocratic thugs. Call it the wrecking of an immigrant dream. I still believe passionately in taking this war to that enemy, of not apologizing for the United States, of opposing appeasement and weakness in the face of evil. As a gay man, I could also uncomplicatedly support a war against some of the most brutal homophobes on the planet, men who also targeted Jews and women and anyone who dissented from their theological bromides. It was because I believed in the Constitution of the United States that I felt no qualms in backing this president and in fighting rhetorical wars on his behalf - because that Constitution was under attack. I grew up in a country where there was no separation of church and state and had to attend a public high school that was anathema to my own religious faith. America has therefore always signified religious and political freedom to me. So when I wrote after 9/11 about the threat of religious fundamentalism abroad, this is how I finished my essay:

In this sense, the symbol of this conflict should not be Old Glory, however stirring it is. What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion. We are fighting not for our country as such or for our flag. We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution, and the possibility of free religious faith it guarantees.

The religious fanatics of 9/11 despise the American Constitution exactly because it guarantees equality under the law, freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. The war I have supported is a war, ultimately, in defense of that Constitution. And that is why I am so committed to it.

THE PRESIDENT'S CONTRADICTION: So you can see, perhaps, why the bid to write anti-gay discrimination into this very Constitution provokes such a strong response from me - and so many other people, gay and straight, and their families. It robs us of something no one in this country should be robbed of - equality and inclusion in the founding document itself. When people tell me that, in weighing the political choices, the war on terror should trump the sanctity of the Constitution, my response is therefore a simple one. The sanctity of the Constitution is what we are fighting for. We're not fighting just to defend ourselves. We are fighting to defend a way of life: pluralism, freedom, equality under the law. You cannot defend the Constitution abroad while undermining it at home. It's a contradiction. And it's a deeply divisive contradiction in a time of great peril.

THE NEED FOR UNITY: To those who say that this amendment is merely a codification of existing marriage law and doesn't target homosexuals, the answer is obvious. If it weren't for the possibility that gay couples might become equal under the law, this amendment wouldn't even exist. Pro-marriage amendments could have been introduced before now every year for decades - to ban no-fault divorce, for example. But none was. This one is entirely designed to single out gay couples for Constitutional exclusion. It therefore seems to me that I'm not the one who needs to defend his position. It's the president who has to answer to the charge that in wartime, he chose to divide this country over the most profound symbol there can be: the Constitution itself. I refuse, in short, to be put in a position where I have to pick between a vital war and fundamental civil equality. The two are inextricable. They are the same war. And this time, the president has picked the wrong side. He will live to be ashamed that he did.

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I love this guy.