Republican Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania must have raised his son right. Despite the fact that Thompson voted against protecting same-sex marriage rights on Wednesday, he attended his gay son’s wedding ceremony the following Friday, NBC News reports.
“Congressman and Mrs. Thompson were thrilled to attend and celebrate their son’s marriage on Friday night as he began this new chapter in his life. The Thompsons are very happy to welcome their new son-in-law into their family,” Maddison Stone, Thompson’s press secretary, told The Washington Post.
But Thompson represents the worst hypocrisy—where your loved ones are accepted, but the other gays who want to marry are kept out. While Thompson’s son confirmed to NBC he’d “married the love of [his] life,” just days earlier, his congressman father voted with 156 other GOP House members against House Bill 8404, known as the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would codify protections for marriages just like his own son’s.
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As defined on the website, HB 8404 “repeals and replaces provisions that define, for purposes of federal law, marriage as between a man and a woman and spouse as a person of the opposite sex with provisions that recognize any marriage that is valid under state law.” The bill also includes the protection of interracial marriage.
According to Centre Daily, Stone called the bill a “messaging stunt” for Democrats. And in an email, Stone added, “This bill was nothing more than an election-year messaging stunt for Democrats in Congress who have failed to address historic inflation and out-of-control prices at gas pumps and grocery stores.”
If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the 2015 ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges—and that’s certainly the hope of Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote in his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion to repeal federal abortion protections that legalizing same-sex marriage at the federal level was one of the court’s “demonstrably erroneous decisions”—same-sex marriage would become illegal in 25 U.S. states, according to PolitiFact.
As reported by The Dallas Morning News, Sen. Ted Cruz accused the Supreme Court of being “clearly wrong” when it affirmed the legal right of same-sex marriages and added that the court “ignored two centuries of our nation’s history.”
On July 16, on Cruz’s show Verdict with Ted Cruz, the senator said:
“Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. … We saw states before Obergefell that were moving, some states were moving to allow gay marriage; other states were moving to allow civil partnerships.”
A Marquette Law School poll taken in early July shows that 66% of respondents favor the right to same-sex marriage, and 84% are in favor of federal civil rights laws that protect folks in the LGBTQ+ community from workplace discrimination.
Fortunately, 47 Republican House members joined Democrats and voted in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act. The legislation now heads for the Senate, where who knows what will happen.