by Mark Silva
Credit Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee chairman, with nothing, if not creativity.
The GOP chairman today is offering a new way of looking at the debate over same-sex marriage:
It'll cost small businesses money.
Georgia GOP convention.jpg
With a number of states legalizing same-sex marriage - much of New England and also Iowa, so far - the debate over gay and lesbian unions that leaders of both parties have been content to leave to the states could escalate to the national stage if the movement for a marriage amendment is revived.
And Steele suggests that his party could forge a broader consensus on the question by recasting gay marriage as an issue that threatens the pocketbooks of small businesses forced to pay more for health care and other benefits for employees' partners.
(And, here we thought the problem with health insurance is that a lot of small businesses aren't providing it to anybody.)
Steele, in the Savannah, Ga., area today following an appearance at the NRA convention in Phoenix yesterday, where he warned that Democrats threaten the gun-owning right of Americans, said he had tried out this argument about gay marriage and small business budgets on an airline flight with a college student who had described herself as fiscally conservative, but socially liberal on issues such as gay marriage -- (did she ask for this conversation?)
"Now all of a sudden I've got someone who wasn't a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for," Steele told Georgia Republicans at their state convention. "So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money."
As Steele spoke of strategies for repositioning the party, he also poked some fun at his earlier pledge to give the GOP a "hip-hop makeover."
""You don't have to wear your pants cut down here or the big bling," the chairman advised the party's faithful in Georgia.
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