Setting the record straight on Governor Grandma

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 07, 2024

There are big things happening in the cultural arena this week. Across the pond, the U.K.’s parliament voted to legalize assisted suicide. Here in the U.S., the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether children have a constitutional right to genital mutilation.

In this week of big national and international happenings, though, I want to talk about a small thing, a local thing. I want to talk about it because I think it has a lot to do with our present situation on the national level. And because it is a cautionary tale for Catholics like, well, me, who are excited about the new possibilities in the political arena.

M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, died on November 20th. She was first elected to statewide office as Connecticut’s Lieutenant Governor in 1994. She became Governor in 2004 when her scandal-plagued predecessor, John Rowland, resigned. Gov. Rell was elected in her own right in 2006 and served one term.

Though an Episcopalian, the Archdiocese of Hartford graciously allowed the Cathedral of St. Joseph to be used for Rell’s funeral, to accommodate what was expected to be a large crowd. According to an eyewitness, the crowd was not so large. And a local former radio host, speaking from the Cathedral’s pulpit, praised the deceased governor for helping to legalize gay marriage.

Our local news media has not printed a single word of criticism about Gov. Rell in the weeks since her death. In wall-to-wall coverage she has been treated as the state’s mother, or kindly grandmother, the healer of Connecticut after the Rowland resignation. Even Waterbury’s Republican-American, the one daily newspaper in Connecticut with a conservative editorial page, had only praise for her, which included this:

A moderate Republican…[Rell] went along with Democratic causes such as abortion rights and civil unions for gay couples—gracefully threading the ideological needle between conservative and liberal tenets, and earning acceptance from both sides of the aisle.

Well. That is certainly one way of putting it. Here is another.

In the 2000s, same-sex marriage was a deeply unpopular cause that was nonetheless being shoved down the nation’s throat. Even deep-blue liberal states opposed it. In 2002, I organized a petition drive that generated 100,000 signatures against same-sex marriage in Connecticut. In February of 2004, the Family Institute of Connecticut held what was then the second-largest rally in state history, 6,000 state citizens who came to Hartford to demand that marriage be protected. In November of 2004 every state where marriage was on the ballot—including, again, deep blue states—voted to protect it. In December of 2004 Jodi Rell, now Governor, told the Hartford Courant that she would oppose gay civil unions—the stalking horse for full same-sex marriage that was floated as a compromise by LGBT lobbyists who had been spooked by the 2004 election results.

But then in March of 2005, Rell told the Courant the opposite. She now supported civil unions. A month later, both houses of our legislature passed civil unions and she quickly signed it into law, all on the same day. Our state supreme court imposed full same-sex marriage by judicial fiat three years later.

Now, as one of those who did the most to try to prevent the redefinition of marriage in my state, you might expect me to be unhappy with this result. And I am. But as I read about Rell’s supposedly graceful threading of the ideological needle, it’s not the result that galls me the most. It is how it came about. And the GOP’s complicity in how same-sex marriage came to be.

Even after rallying 6,000 social conservatives at our state capitol, the House Republicans refused to introduce a Defense of Marriage Act. In her assessment of the 2004 legislative session for the ACLU—which in those days was available on the web—the state’s leading gay lobbyist expressed pleasant surprise that the CT GOP did not even introduce a DOMA after our rally. A year later they did attach a now-toothless DOMA to the very bill inventing gay civil unions. As we predicted, our state supreme court ruled that combination—marriage for straight couples, civil unions for gay couples—to be a violation of equal protection and used the very DOMA itself as the reason to change the definition of marriage in Connecticut.

Here’s the thing. Among “moderate” Republicans, that seems to have been the plan all along. Placate the restless natives—those of us who petitioned and rallied to protect marriage—by pretending to oppose same-sex marriage, pass a civil unions law knowing full well the court will use it to redefine marriage, and then throw up your hands and claim it was the courts that did it and there’s nothing you can do about it. A few years later when the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its pro-gay marriage rulings, a local Republican operative posted on Facebook: “Here’s a dirty little secret: Hundreds of Republican legislators across the country just breathed a huge sigh of relief.” To which I replied: “Dirty, yes, secret, no.”

Here’s the other thing. In 2012, Connecticut’s legislature abolished the death penalty. But they passed a law that somehow left the heinous murderers of one particularly infamous and much-publicized crime still on death row. Even for the Democrats, it would have been politically inexpedient to do otherwise. When a few years later our state supreme court applied that law to those murderers too, the Connecticut GOP expressed outrage. They have expressed outrage about it ever since. But the Democrats were simply employing the same method that they—the always-moderate CT GOP—likewise employed in the matter of same-sex marriage. Pass as much of an unpopular law as you can, knowing that you just gave the green light to the courts to finish the job. Then pretend it wasn’t you, it was the courts. Tellingly, the CT GOP has never expressed the same outrage over our state supreme court’s judicial activism on same-sex marriage that it has on abolishing the death penalty. That is because they really did oppose the latter while they really did support, even twenty years ago, the former.

I mention all this because, well, first of all, no one else will. But someone should. It ought to be part of the public record. Grandma Rell, God rest her soul, did not just help bring about a redefinition of marriage in the state of Connecticut. She did it in the squirreliest way possible. Her and all the members of her party who voted for the 2005 civil unions law.

But I also mention it because these betrayals led to the world we are living in today. It was same-sex marriage that put enormous wind in the sails of cancel culture, gender ideology, and all the related societal ills that we have been dealing with ever since. Read Matthew Schmitz’s How Gay Marriage Changed America. And when you read it, know that it was gracious Grandma Rell who gracefully gave us that world.

Finally, I mention it as a cautionary tale. We are still in the afterglow of the recent presidential election. I share everyone’s excitement at the bullets that have been dodged (sometimes literally) and at the possibilities that lie ahead. But, a warning.

There are centrifugal forces in the Republican Party that are always pulling it back to the sort of chicanery I just described. We saw it in the Romney campaign of 2012, when he shed the social issues as soon as he had the nomination. We saw it in the GOP’s 2013 “autopsy” report, which still somehow blamed Romney’s loss on social conservatism. We see it even now, with the compromises Trump-Vance made to get over the finish line.

“Put not your trust in princes,” the Psalmist tells us. Yes, even the ones who overturned Roe v. Wade for us. Catholics must be involved in politics. It is, in fact, a noble calling. But we should have no illusions about the “princes” with whom we must deal. Or the grandmas.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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• Posted by: DrJazz - Dec. 11, 2024 4:30 PM ET USA

  This reminds me of when we gathered 137,000 signatures for a Massachusetts ballot question in 2005, to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. All that was needed were two pro forma approvals from the state legislature, which had never been denied before. The first vote passed but the second was defeated, and the question never appeared on the ballot. It seems there are always forces - Republican, conservative, and "Catholic" - that want to pull the law away from what is right.