Look Who’s in Bed Together on Gay Marriage Fight

L ying on his cot in the Longworth House Office Building in the small of the night, Jason Chaffetz had a scary dream: The conservative Republican from Utah had beaten the odds, defeated an incumbent and made it to Washington, only to end up by some bizarre twist of events arm-in-arm with Marion Barry, the crack-smoking laughingstock former mayor of the District of Columbia.

“Oh man, if I had run a campaign saying I’d be working closely with Marion Barry, I don’t know that I would have been elected,” Chaffetz says.

The nightmare turns out to be reality: Chaffetz, once the placekicker on the Brigham Young University football team, is now the ranking Republican on the House subcommittee in charge of D.C. affairs, and in that role he is leading the rush against the District’s decision to recognize same-sex marriages. The freshman congressman is utterly confident that his is the moral position on the issue, but he admits to a certain frisson of doubt when he learned that his accidental ally in this fight is the former Mayor for Life, an erstwhile champion of gay rights who has decided that same-sex nuptials are immoral.

Chaffetz has never met Barry, but he’s willing to have lunch with the man — if Barry is willing to meet at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, the only Washington restaurant the congressman frequents. (This may prove to be a stumbling block, as Barry leans more toward fruit juices and health foods these days.)

If the two do break bread, they’ll discover that they share a view that gay couples ought to have the same legal rights as any other Americans, but should not be permitted to marry. They’ll take comfort in the fact that their views are both based on the biblical definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. They’re both happy to point to the fact that President Obama is also opposed to gay marriage.

But the lunch is destined not to be a lovefest. It’s not just that Chaffetz and Barry come from wildly disparate backgrounds or represent very different Americas, although it is true that Chaffetz’s district is 88 percent white and only 25 percent of his constituents have a college degree, whereas Washington is 56 percent black and 45 percent of its residents have a bachelor’s or beyond.

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Another gay-rights bill goes down in Utah

Another Common Ground gay-rights bill has died. But this one wasn’t killed by opposing state lawmakers.

This measure was done in by the sponsor herself.

Rep. Jackie Biskupski, D-Salt Lake City, decided Friday to pull her bill, which would have sought voter approval to repeal the second part of Utah’s constitutional gay-marriage ban (known as Amendment 3) to avoid confusion about which protections are the legal equivalent of marriage.

“I believe the second clause of Amendment 3 has been misconstrued by many and will continue to be a stumbling block for reasonable policies in the future,” Biskupski said in a news release from Common Ground Initiative backer Equality Utah.

“However, I believe that the other Common Ground bills have broader support and cannot be construed as having anything to do with marriage. “By pulling this bill,” she continued, “we hope to make a good-faith effort to demonstrate that the protections we’re talking about have nothing to do with marriage and in no way conflict with Amendment 3.”

Some feared Biskupski’s bill was a move to pave the way for civil unions, which recent polls show Utahns overwhelmingly oppose. “By dumping that bill, we are bringing attention to the most important items on our legislative agenda,” said Mike Thompson, executive director of Equality Utah, items that he says most Utahns favor.

See Legislature: Another gay-rights bill goes down
Salt Lake Tribune