Jeb Bush, Bowing Down To Big Money Donors, Flip Flops On Gay Rights – Sort Of

Likely 2016 Republican candidate Jeb Bush is changing his positions – and revealing his ignorance – on gay rights and “religious freedom” laws, based on which big money donors he’s addressing.

On Monday, Jeb Bush sat down with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt and threw his support to Mike Pence on the issue of the Indiana governor’s highly controversial and discriminatory “religious freedom” law.

“I think if you, if they actually got briefed on the law that they wouldn’t be blasting this law. I think Governor Pence has done the right thing,” Bush told Hewitt. “I just think once the facts are established, people aren’t going to see this as discriminatory at all.”

That played well with Hewitt’s audience, and Bush’s base of right wing evangelicals.

On Wednesday, Bush couldn’t pull off a repeat performance, so he flip-flopped. Sort of.

The former Florida governor was speaking “in a closed-door Silicon Valley fund-raiser, telling a small group of potential supporters that a ‘consensus-oriented’ approach would have been better at the outset,” the New York Times reports. 

“Bush’s comments were strikingly different in tone and in scope from what he said on Monday night,” the Times observes.

“By the end of the week,” Bush told donors Wednesday, “I think Indiana will be in the right place, which is to say that we need in a big diverse country like America, we need to have space for people to act on their conscience, that it is a constitutional right that religious freedom is a core value of our country.”

But “we shouldn’t discriminate based on sexual orientation,” he added. “So what the State of Indiana is going to end up doing is probably get to that place.”

Salon’s Joan Walsh labeled Bush’s updated comments “a steaming bowl of mush.”

And here’s why.

“Bush was in a tough place,” Walsh explains. “It was all such bad timing – as he headed to Silicon Valley to raise megabucks for his Right to Rise PAC. Bay Area businesses like Twitter, Yelp and Salesforce, plus valley titan Apple, had all blasted the law. Still, on Monday night, Bush sounded like Sen. Ted Cruz in his support for poor Mike Pence, who had been asked five times on Sunday whether the bill allowed discrimination against LGBT Americans and couldn’t ever say yes or no.”

She notes Gov. Pence, who on Tuesday called for an amendment to “clarify” the “religious freedom” law, had “pulled the rug out from under Bush, just as he headed to Silicon Valley. Already, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci reports, the former Florida governor has ‘sucked the oxygen out of the room’ when it comes to California cash. A Republican insider told her Bush has become ‘the darling of tried-and-true donors, and they’re solidly behind him.'”

That “solidly behind him” may not hold up, exactly.

As the Times notes, just after Wednesday’s donor event, “a prominent venture capitalist” observed that in “Silicon Valley, we are very liberal on the issues of gays and women’s rights, and we’re all sensitive to the apparent wording of the law.”

“I don’t know what Jeb feels,” he added.

 

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