Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is reportedly launching a "Faith, Family, and Values Tour" next week that will include Catholic legal scholar Douglas Kmiec as one of the campaign's surrogates. Kmiec wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle this summer in which he urged support for passing California's marriage ban, Proposition 8.
The Christian Broadcasting Network is reporting that the Obama campaign next week will kick off “Barack Obama: Faith, Family, and Values Tour,” designed to woo the votes of left-leaning Catholics, progressive Evangelicals, and some conservative mainline Protestants. If LGBT people find the tour eerily reminiscent of the South Carolina gospel tour the campaign arranged last year with antigay "ex-gay" gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, their instincts may not be far off.
CBN names Catholic legal scholar Douglas Kmiec as one of the religious surrogates who will hit the road stumping for Obama. Kmiec wrote a June 13 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle supporting California's Proposition 8, the ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage, titled "On Same-Sex Marriage: Should California Amend Its Constitution? Say 'No' to the Brave New World." Kmiec's first two sentences in the piece read, "The California ballot initiative intended to set aside the state supreme court's judicial invention of same-sex marriage deserves public support. Maybe it is enough to say, as many do in conversation, that it merely re-secures a millennia of tradition and common sense."
In the op-ed, Kmiec says the state supreme court ignored the separation of church and state in its ruling and argues that allowing gay marriage serves to separate the institution of marriage from procreation.
He concludes his op-ed: "When carefully assessed, the acquisition of unnatural reproductive means often advances the interests of the very affluent through a libertarian exercise that would threaten all hope of democratic equality. In a depopulating world, the claim that there is a universal right to marry regardless of gender becomes a frightening ally of a claimed universal right to access to genetically engineered children. People should reject this claim by returning traditional marriage to its rightful place."
Kmiec's views run counter to those of Obama, who voiced his opposition to Proposition 8 in a letter addressed to San Francisco's Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club. "I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states," the Illinois senator wrote.
Contacted by The Advocate for comment, Obama campaign spokesperson Shin Inouye confirmed CBN's report, reiterated Obama's support for LGBT rights, and echoed the theme of diversity that Obama often trumpets himself.
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Eleveld is the political editor of The Advocate.