The online video, sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, is part of the organization’s “New Yorkers for Marriage Equality” campaign, which features other prominent political figures speaking in favor of marriage equality. In the video, Barbara Bush said, “New York is about fairness and equality, and everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love.”
Startled Reactions
News of Barbara Bush’s support for gay rights rocked San Narciso County, whose citizens contributed a staggering amount of money to support California’s Proposition 8, which overturned a previous ruling that had legalized same sex unions in the state.
Verna Yerth, longtime waitress at Piers Addelson’s Pea House, said, “I don’t make that much money, but I spent all my savings to get Prop 8 passed. I didn’t eat for a week. And now, the daughter of one of the most influential conservative Christians in the last generation is abandoning her faith? I suppose that’s what happens when you move to a city like New York, which has no moral code or anything close to godly values.”
“Ms. Bush is certainly entitled to her opinion as a private citizen,” said Father Preternature of San Narciso’s lone Catholic church, “but I choose to base my opinions on over 5,700 years of Judeo-Christian moral theology. Homosexuality is not only an evolutionary dead end, it’s a cliche, narcissistic lifestyle choice that should be discouraged in every way possible.”
But Janus Heuchler, director of San Narcio’s Poeslaw Institute for Social Research and Development (PISRAD), believes that people in the community have misunderstood the message.
A Conservative Message Lost in Translation?
“It’s intriguing to me,” Heuchler said in a phone interview. “The people in San Narciso fail to realize that Barbara Bush is making a similar point. She hasn’t abandoned her family’s conservative legacy; she’s embracing it. She is in fact carrying her father’s apocalyptic ideals to their ultimate, and I feel more reasonable, conclusion.”
Heuchler cited the primary religious influences in George W. Bush’s life to clarify his stance.
“The Reverend Billy Graham taught Bush to live in anticipation of the Second Coming. But it was his friendship with Dr. Tony Evans that shaped Bush’s political understanding of how to conduct himself in a world toppling toward Rapture,” Heuchler explained.
Dr. Evans, founder of the Promise Keepers movement in Texas, convinced a younger George Bush that “the world should be seen from a divine viewpoint.”
S.R. Shearer of Antipas Ministries further defined the movement’s power in shaping George Bush’s ideology.
“Most of the leaders of the Promise Keepers embrace a doctrine of ‘end time’ (eschatology), known as ‘dominionism.’ Dominionism pictures the seizure of earthly power by the ‘people of God’ as the only means through which the world can be rescued. It is the eschatology that Bush has imbibed; an eschatology through which he has gradually (and easily) come to see himself as an agent of God who has been called by him to ‘restore the earth to God's control,’ a ‘chosen vessel,’ so to speak, to bring in the Restoration of All Things.”
As president, George Bush often used this end-of-the-world rhetoric in his speeches. After the attacks of September 11, for example, Bush told the people of America, “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation.”
Heuchler said, “Of course George Bush was preoccupied with the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth, as he saw it, which comes about through the apocalypse. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Countless Christians worldwide would agree. Many Muslims too. But using the language of violence and war tends to rub the ‘turn the other cheek’ crowd the wrong way. I think what Barbara Bush has done is much more subtle and effective.”
And according to Heuchler, Barbara Bush’s intent was to illustrate how allowing gay marriage would not only destroy traditional family structures, but systematically stifle reproduction as more and more Americans succumb to the homosexual lifestyle choice.
“It’s passive genocide,” Heuchler beamed, “and it’s ingenious. In the end, you’ve got exactly what President Bush promised: a dead world of fallen sinners and righteous corpses, awaiting the return of Christ, God’s judgment, and their final rewards in the afterlife. Except for all the homosexuals, who will probably end up in Hell according to some passage in the New Testament I can never quite locate. But I’m told it’s in there.”
