Bushism Of The Day

Maybe Slate could a new feature: "Kerryism du Jour". It looks like the Senator got the state correct, but not much else, while telling this anecdote:

Then Mr. Kerry drew a connection between racism and antigay crime, noting the 1998 murder of a gay college student, Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, but mangling a reference to James Byrd Jr., a black man who was dragged to his death the same year in Jasper, Tex., by three men including John William King, all of whom were convicted of murder.

"Let me tell you something, when Matthew Shepard gets crucified on a fence in Wyoming only because he was gay," he said, "when Mr. King gets dragged behind of a truck down in Texas by chains and his body is mutilated only because he's gay — I think that's a matter of rights in the United States of America."

As to content, let's highlight his statement that "American citizens deserve the protection of the equal protection clause" as he relates it to gay rights. In this context, it suggests that states can go ahead and amend their constitutions all they like (Kerry currently supports a Massacusetts state amendment barring gay marriage). In what we infer to be Kerry's current view, once a Federal judge gets ahold of this issue and applies the Fourteenth Amendment properly, all the state decisions will be swept away.

MORE: In the Boston Globe report, we find:

The senator replied by briefly noting his support of preserving marriage for a man and a woman, but then began making a full-throated defense of civil rights for gays and lesbians -- recalling how minorities were once denied entrance to universities, and insisting that just as the Equal Protection Clause protected them, so, too, should it protect the rights of homosexuals.

A few days ago he was a states rights advocate. Stay tuned.

Comments

[Cecil Turner]

Well, in the faint praise department, he's better than Wes Clark. At least this convoluted, dicked-up statement appears to be trying to take a position on something.

The standard for "incoherent" has to be Clark's Salon commentary on all the ways the Administration had messed up the Iraq invasion--and in the next sentence predicting (correctly) the war will only last 2-3 weeks. Until someone matches that, we probably ought to retire the term.

But for someone who isn't in Wes's league, this is a pretty good effort . . .

[TM]

He does seem to be drifting to a coherent and defensible position, which will amount to, this should be decided by the Federal Courts, which have a long history of leading on civil rights issues.

Now, will he say it that clearly? Not exactly "Profiles in Courage" - let someone else decide, please - but at least I get it.

[JD]

Kerry's position(s) on this issue alone are far to numerous to even begin to count without some type of Cray supercomputer. The more he campaigns and speaks, the more President Bush's numbers will go up.