John McCain: ‘Which Is More Important: LGBT Or Border Security?’

John McCain created a ludicrous false equivalency last week, asking, “Which is more important: LGBT or border security?” The Republican Senator’s comment came at a Politico breakfast, as the Washington Post reports:

“The president in his plan said that you should treat same-sex families the same way we treat heterosexual families,” White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Friday on “Political Capital With Al Hunt.” “It’s wrong to discriminate. It’s a natural extension of the president’s view about same-sex marriage, the view about providing equal rights, no matter who you love.”

But congressional Republicans immediately condemned the idea and warned that the measure imperils broader immigration reform. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of the senators on the eight-member bipartisan working group on immigration, said at a Politico breakfast last week that injecting social issues into the debate over immigration legislation “is the best way to derail it.”

“Which is more important: LGBT or border security?” McCain said, using an abbreviation for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. “I’ll tell you what my priorities are.”

Andrew Sullivan today awarded Senator McCain his infamous “Malkin Award” — a recognition of radical right-wing rhetoric, named for Michelle Malkin — for the comment:

Sullivan, himself one part of a same-sex married bi-national couple, writes:

But how on earth are the two contradictory? Allowing same-sex spouses the same immigration rights as opposite-sex spouses would make not an iota of difference to border security, or to anything else to do with immigration. But telling an American citizen that he or she can only live with his husband or her wife if they emigrate to another country violates basic humanity and equal protection of the laws.