The Rove Divorce

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


News flash: Karl Rove divorced his (second) wife last week. (And tweeted not one word about it.) Now liberal bloggers and Twitterers are having a field day (or hour), noting that the fellow who engineered George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection by pushing anti-gay marriage initiatives in swing states has demonstrated (again) a less than enthusiastic stance regarding the sanctity of marriage.

For those looking for Rove quotes on the importance of heterosexual marriage, here’s a useful tidbit from 2004. The weekend after Bush won reelection, Rove appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and declared that Bush would push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The following exchange ensued:

WALLACE: Explain to me why civil unions can be handled at the state level but marriage can’t.

ROVE: Well, marriage is a very important part of our culture and our society. If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal. And the ideal is that marriage ought to be and should be a union of a man and a woman.

And we cannot allow activist judges to overturn that. We cannot allow activist local elected officials to thumb their nose at 5,000 years of human history and determine that marriage is something else.

No one ever can know what occurs within someone else’s marriage, and people are indeed permitted to preach ideals they cannot meet. (Otherwise, the pulpits would be empty on Sunday morning.) But given that Rove contended that the way to “a hopeful and decent society” is by prohibiting gay marriage and promoting heterosexual marriage, the failure of his own heterosexual marriage is all the more tragic, meaning that this great nation is now one step further from becoming that “hopeful and decent society” Rove and the rest of us yearn for.

You can follow David Corn’s posts and media appearances via Twitter.

 

 

 

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate