Dear Mr. Kudlow,
In your commentary on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech at the recent Republican convention in New York, you referred to an unrepentant "vision of muscular Republicanism". In your subsequent column in the National Review on September 15th, "Stocks & Polls Agree on Bush" you justify your support for Schwarzenegger and the current Administration in purely economic terms--that President Bush espouses a vision of an "ownership-society" based on "consumer- and investor-based solutions" instead of government dependency. The reelection of President Bush therefore augurs to directly benefit the markets and that this eventuality is being discounted by the markets in the form of an apparent Bush reelection "bounce". You also make specific reference to voters in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey "harboring a lot of secret pro-Bush sentiment since 9/11", despite the fact that they may not agree with Bush on social policies or the "messy campaign" in Iraq.
This leads me to wonder:
· What benefits from a Bush reelection do you see accruing to the 210 million Americans not lucky enough to be members of the "90-million strong investor class"?
· What benefits will there be for the children and grandchildren of today's investor class who will be paying back the current administration's fiscal profligacy for decades to come?
· What benefits will there be for the bereaved working class American families whose fathers, brothers, sons and even mothers and daughters have perished or been maimed in the deserts of Iraq for reasons now proven to be incontrovertibly unrelated to either 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, al-Qa'ida, WMD or the War on Terror?
In 1980, Ronald Reagan reinvented the Republican Party by uniting the economic interests of the investor class with the social interests of religious conservatives. And many independent voters were able to find something for themselves à la carte under this big Republican tent. In the years since, whereas both Democratic and Republican administrations have successfully enacted much of Reagan's economic policy agenda including tax cuts, deregulation and trade liberalization, most of the planks of the Republican social platform have been abandoned due to lack of public support as was the case with abortion rights or judicial fiat as was the case with prayer in public schools.
The fact is that there has never really been a great deal of overlap between the economic and social policy interest groups within the Republican Party. Frankly speaking, it is not prima facie evident why a Midwestern working class white family should aggressively support capital gains tax cuts for Connecticut millionaires such as yourself. What the current Republican Party has been lacking since Reagan was an issue that could invigorate social conservatives while being simultaneously innocuous to Republican economic interests. The solution is now unfortunately clear: homosexual rights.
A key component of President Bush's Agenda for America is "to defend traditional marriage laws from activist judges who threaten to legislate from the bench to impose same-sex marriage and deny the voice of the people." (1) What does this mean in practice? As a homosexual African American man living abroad, I am unable to return the United States with my foreign partner due to President Bush's opposition to Permanent Partner's legislation. Apparently, he is more interested in granting immigration rights to migrant workers from Mexico than to the foreign born partners of tax paying American citizens. Currently American tax laws reinforce this position by granting me an $85K/year Foreign Earned Income Tax Credit just to stay out of the country.
Republican social conservatives have learned to characterize constitutional rights for homosexual citizens narrowly as "same sex marriage rights" and/or “special rights” in order to further divide the mass of mainstream middle class voters. This strategy is not all together different from the white aristocracy in the South attempting to characterize persistent economic inequalities there under the rubric of "racial issues"--this being a cynical attempt to win the support of working class Southern whites for economic policies such as Current Use Property Taxation which left their own children's public schools woefully underfunded. The goal is always the same--to unite the party around oppressive social policies targeted at some minority group for the primary goal of granting greater economic benefits to the wealthy. Such attempts often run afoul of the U.S. Constitution, as was the case with the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning a Texas law that criminalized homosexual but not heterosexual sodomy (2). Here is a brief list of some of the “special rights” currently being denied to homosexual Americans as of this writing:
· Assumption of a Partner's Pension
· Automatic Inheritance
· Bereavement Leave
· Burial Determination
· Child Custody
· Divorce Protections
· Domestic Violence Protections
· Exemption from Property Tax on a Partner’s Death
· Immigration Rights for Foreign Spouses
· Joint Adoption and Foster Care
· Joint Bankruptcy
· Joint Insurance
· Joint Parenting (Insurance Coverage, School Records)
· Joint Tax Treatment
· Medical Decisions on Behalf of a Partner
· Sick Leave to Care for a Partner
· Social Security Survivor Benefits
· Various Property Rights
· Visitation of a Partner in a Hospital or Prison
· Visitation of a Partner’s Children
· Wrongful Death Benefits
I include the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for your review.
Amendment XIV.
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Governor Schwarzenegger concludes his speech by proclaiming that "We are still the lamp lighting the world, especially for those who struggle. . . . No matter in what injustice they are trapped . . . they hear our call, they see our light, and they feel the pull of our freedom." Let us hope that you and other thought leaders who advocate the reelection of this Administration will someday be able to espouse a somewhat less "muscular" vision of social and economic freedom and equality that is inclusive of all Americans.
Sincerely,
Frederick E. Ferguson
t's 6:30 AM and I can't sleep. I am thinking of my friend who turned 30 years old a few days ago only to come home to find an activation notice ordering him to Iraq. He's the second of my friends to get the call.
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