Likely 2016 GOP Presidential Candidate Jeb Bush: Same-Sex Marriage Is A State Issue

Jeb Bush, who is ranked number one in many 2016 GOP polls, says same-sex marriage is a states’ rights issue.

Jeb Bush, brother and son of former presidents, is likely to declare his candidacy for president soon. The former Republican governor of Florida has tried to position himself as a moderate in an increasingly extreme party, but his stance on issues like same-sex marriage reveal just how out of touch, vacillating, and and antiquated those positions are.

“As readers may recall,” MSNBC reported last week, “Bush started 2013 endorsing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Six weeks later, he took the opposite position. A few days later, he went back to his original position again.”

On same-sex marriage, Bush says same-sex marriage is a states’ rights issue. 

As governor of Florida, Bush made clear he is against marriage equality. 

“Back in 2006 Bush said he was leaning towards support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage in Florida, after previously holding that the ban was unnecessary,” the Washington Post reported last year.

Bush in 2012 had reaffirmed his opposition to same-sex couples marrying, but offered a tenuous comment.

“I don’t think people need to be discriminated against because they don’t share my belief on this, and if people love their children with all their heart and soul and that’s what they do and that’s how they organize their life that should be held up as examples for others to follow because we need it,” he told Charlie Rose last June. “We desperately need it and that can take all sorts of forms. It doesn’t have to take the one that I think should be sanctioned under the law.”

But now, Jeb Bush, ranking number one in most major polls that don’t include a Mitt Romney run, says same-sex marriage should be left to the states. The 61-year old Roman Catholic, speaking about same-sex marriage about to become legal in Florida, told the Miami Herald he is opposed, because the people have already spoken.

“It ought be a local decision. I mean, a state decision,” the former governor said Sunday in a brief interview. “The state decided. The people of the state decided. But it’s been overturned by the courts, I guess.”

Bush’s comment supporting majority-rule discrimination should be one-hundred percent not surprising.

Jeb Bush has called recent civil rights movements, including gay rights, women’s rights, and African-American rights “modern victim movements.” 

He is also opposed to hate crimes laws, and as governor “[d]ismantled Florida’s affirmative action program.”

 

Photo: Jeb Bush at CPAC in 2013, by Gage Skidmore. Image via Flickr.
Hat tip: LGBTQ Nation