Looking an audience of Democrats — mainly, in fact, of university-based Democrats — in the eye yesterday, one candidate in the crowded field of Democrats running for president stepped forward and boldly and courageously declared his support for … abortion rights. Speaking at Drake University in Des Moines,
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Friday that if he is elected president, he would use abortion as a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, rejecting candidates who don’t support the 1973 decision legalizing abortion.
“I know that I am going to upset some people,” Richardson said. “I would say, ‘Do you believe Roe v. Wade is settled law?’ and if they say, ‘Yes,’ they have a good chance of being picked. If they say ‘No,’ I will not pick them.”
That’s not all president-to-be Richardson said. There was more:
…. When I am president, I am going to restore habeas corpus. We are going to shut down Guantanamo Bay. We are going to say that we are for civil rights and affirmative action, and … we are a nation that is not going to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.”
I think it interesting that Richardson distinguished affirmative action from civil rights, implicitly recognizing that it is possible to support one and not the other. That distinction made his additional promise — that “we are a nation that is not going to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation” — sound a bit less emphatic than I suspect he intended, making gays and lesbians into second-class recipients of civil rights protection.
How did he do that? you ask. Here’s how. In supporting affirmative action, Richardson supports policies that treat some people better than others because of their race or ethnicity (many of whose beneficiaries, as it happens, share his own Hispanic, or partly Hispanic, ethnicity). Gays and lesbians, on the other hand, apparently don’t deserve this special treatment. They have to settle for being treated with neutral, sex-blind non-discrimination.
Like all supporters of affirmative action, Richardson obviously believes that some people have more civil rights than others.
