Listen: Rick Perry ‘Probably Would’ Attend A Gay Wedding, Doesn’t See Marriage As Important Issue

Rick Perry is the latest likely GOP presidential candidate to get asked “the question.” 

This entire spate of pundits and reporters asking likely Republican presidential candidates has gone from an interesting barometer of how they relate to and see gay people, to an abuse of the issue.

For most people, marriage – say, their own marriage – is a dramatically important issue. If it’s true that when you die your entire life flashes before you, I know for me, my wedding day will be front and center.

Conservatives love to claim that (different-sex) marriage is the bedrock of civilization. For many, they tell us repeatedly, there is no issue more important.

Now, the “Would you attend a same-sex wedding?” question has become almost a joke, just one more example of how the anti-gay right belittles and tries to destroy our marriages, which are sacrosanct to many in the LGBT community.

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Rick Perry was the latest to get asked the question.

Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum have said “no.” (The “hell” was likely implied.)

Marco Rubio became the first to say he would if it were the wedding of a loved one.

Scott Walker played Solomon, and cut the baby in half – he attended a same-sex reception, but not the wedding.

John Kasich all but broke his arm patting himself on the back for accepting a gay friend’s wedding invitation – after learning his wife was going, with or without him.

And today, Rick Perry said he “probably would,” before dodging off into a rant about the future of the country and the importance of the economy and national defense.

Marriage, Perry says, is a “secondary or tertiary” issue when it comes to “the future of this country.”

Listen:

Perhaps it was a different Rick Perry who has repeatedly, for years, compared being gay to being an alcoholic while touting the sanctity of marriage?

“As conservatives we believe in the sanctity of life,” Perry told 450 voters and supporters in New Hampshire in 2011. “We believe in the sanctity of traditional marriage. And I applaud those legislators in New Hampshire who are working to defend marriage as an institution between one man and one woman, realizing that children need to be raised in a loving home by a mother and a father.”

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license