Umm....
Good on CNN for asking Rand Paul to 'splain himself on an issue that he
really needs to 'splain himself on.
CNN's Dana Bash pushed presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on his views on same-sex marriage on Sunday, asking him why, as a libertarian, he doesn't believe gay people should have the freedom to marry.
"Why do you believe just as a core principle, as a libertarian, that people should be left alone, but not when it comes to their right to marry somebody they love?" Bash asked Paul on "State of the Union."
The answer to that, of course, is that Rand Paul does not give a damn what his core beliefs are, there's votes to be wooed in Iowa. That presumes Rand Paul has core beliefs, of course, and not just ones borrowed from his father because they came with the mailing list.
Paul responded by differentiating between traditional marriage and a "contract" between gay people.
"Well, no. I mean states -- states will end up making the decisions on these things. I think that there's a religious connotation to marriage. I believe in the traditional religious connotation to this," Paul answered. "But I also believe people ought to be treated fairly under the law. I see no reason why if the marriage contract conveys certain things that if -- if you -- if you want to marry another woman that you can do that and have a contract."
Let's see, so we've got one states' rights, one Because My Religion Thinks You're Icky, and a sprinkled suggestion of separate but equalism. We could parse it all out, perhaps to point out that the
marriage contract is called that because it is indeed a legal construct that confers a bevy of rights, all of them granted by our nation's government and not your personal God, who probably won't be checking the paperwork when you and your life partner want to meet for cloud tennis in the afterlife, but Paul's answer is so muddled it's not even worth it.
You would think that this is a subject that has come up before, and he'd better find a more polished answer than that before the debates roll around. As it stands, the answer suffers from the usual Rand attempt to cater to the old evangelical codger vote while trying mightily not to offend the hipster libertarians that still distribute his bumper stickers. A fine game if you can pull it off, but one that gets harder to play the longer you play it.