On Gay Marriage, Bush May Have Said All He's Going To
By ELISABETH BUMILLER, NEW YORK TIMES
ASHINGTON
When President Bush announced his support last week for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his body language in the Roosevelt Room did not seem to match his words. Mr. Bush may have forcefully defended the union of a man and a woman as "the most fundamental institution of civilization," but even some White House officials said he appeared uncomfortable.
When Mr. Bush finished his five-minute statement ? with reporters arranged before him in White House-assigned seats, waiting for the news conference that appeared to be coming ? he abruptly turned on his heel and strode from the room, ignoring all questions.
"Is he coming back?" a television reporter called out.
He was not.
Mr. Bush was acting under enormous pressure from his evangelical Christian supporters, who had intensified their demands in recent months that the president speak out in defense of traditional marriage. His more moderate supporters, on the other hand, worried that he might look like a gay basher.
Mr. Bush's friends say that is hardly the case and that the president is quite comfortable with gays. Laura Bush, when asked in a recent interview by The New York Times if she and her husband had gay friends, easily replied: "Sure, of course. Everyone does."
Although the president's behavior might reinforce the view among his critics that he was acting cynically when he endorsed the amendment, the fact is that he has a record of tolerance in personal situations.
Last spring, during a class of 1968 Yale reunion that he held at the White House, Mr. Bush had a particularly striking encounter with Petra Leilani Akwai, who in 2002 had a sex-change operation. At Yale, Ms. Akwai was known as Peter Clarence Akwai.
"I was in the receiving line, I was dressed in an evening dress, and I was being escorted by a male friend from the Yale class of 1986," Ms. Akwai said in a telephone interview this weekend from Germany, where she lives. "And I said, `Hello, George.' And in order for him not to be confused, in case he hadn't been briefed, because our class was all male, I said, `I guess the last time we spoke, I was still living as a man.' "
"And he said," Ms. Akwai recounted, " `But now you're you.' "
Ms. Akwai said the president seemed completely comfortable. "He leaned forward and gave me a little sort of smile," she said. "I thought it was a sincere thing, and it was very charming."
Mr. Bush has appointed some openly gay federal officials to jobs at the White House. These include Scott Evertz, who was the president's first adviser on AIDS. When Mr. Evertz upset conservatives by advocating the use of condoms, he was moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.
But Mr. Evertz was replaced by another openly gay official, Dr. Joe O'Neill, who is now a deputy director in the State Department's program to fight AIDS worldwide.
White House officials say that Mr. Bush will not speak out about the amendment banning gay marriage in his political trips around the country and will leave his five-minute Roosevelt Room announcement as his major show on the issue.
That was obvious at a political fund-raiser in Louisville, Ky., last week, when Mr. Bush never once used the words "gay marriage" in his stump speech. His only allusion to it was a line about judges who have cleared the way for gay marriages in some states.
"We will not stand for judges who undermine democracy by legislating from the bench, or try to remake the culture of America by court order," Mr. Bush said, to applause from the $2,000-a-plate crowd.
While Mr. Bush's closest advisers say that he genuinely feels that marriage is between a man and a woman only ? the same position that Senators John Kerry and John Edwards take ? some of his advisers also say the president would have been better off keeping his opinions to himself.
Last summer, Charles Francis, a Bush family friend and a co-chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, an influential gay-straight political alliance, bemoaned what might happen if gay marriage were to become an issue in the 2004 campaign.
"Marriage panic is not good for the political process or the country," Mr. Francis said then.
By November, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made its ruling allowing gay marriage in the state, the issue was well on its way. "We're hopeful that the campaign will steer clear of this amendment," Mr. Francis said in an interview at the time. "It's an issue of tone. It's the issue of writing discrimination into the founding document. Also it's so distracting from the real priorities of the campaign, which are his leadership, the war in Iraq and the economy."
Last week, Mr. Francis did not return phone calls about Mr. Bush's announcement in the Roosevelt Room.