Reply #4: Conservatives Don't Like John Danforth [View All]

[liberalpragmatist]

He had a reputation as a moderate in the Senate (although he played a key role in appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court).

He's publishing a book that blasts the GOP over gay rights, stem cell research, and the role of religion in politics.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Bushs_second_choice_for_Vice_President_0915.html

"I believe that homosexuality is a matter of sexual orientation rather than preference," he writes. "Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is, in my view, comparable to discrimination on other civil rights grounds. It is wrong, and it should be prohibited by law."

"I think that the only purpose served by the campaign for the amendment is the humiliation of gay Americans, advocated by the Christian right and eagerly supported by its suitors in the Republican Party," he adds. "In reality, it is gay bashing."

Danforth then goes even further, saying supporters' assertions that the amendment would protect marriage is ludicrous.

"America's divorce rate is now over 50 percent, and marriage is under attack from a number of quarters: finances, promiscuity, alcohol and drugs, the pressures of work, cultural acceptance of divorce, et cetera," he pens. "But it is incomprehensible that one of these threats is when someone else, whom we have never seen, in a place where we may have never been, has done something we don't like."