Brewer, The anti Gay Witch of Arizona changing direction on her anti gay ways?
There aren't many more ticks of the clock in the turbulent administration of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, yet once again she continues to surprise.
The woman who rode the thermals of hard-nosed immigration law to her first elective term as governor is now gliding to a finish with this tantalizing hint of social progress:
Arizona should probably extend its civil-rights laws to gays, Brewer told Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services this week.
"I do not believe in discrimination," she said. "We are in the United States of America and we have great privilege that is afforded to everyone."
Take a moment and chew on that.
The same Jan Brewer who scratched her name on SB 1070 and launched 1,000 boycotts, who was the darling of Fox News and the defiant finger that upbraided President Obama, is now supporting gay rights.
Four years ago, when the cardinal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was comparing Jan Brewer's Arizona to Nazi Germany and calling her handiwork "the country's most retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless anti-immigrant law," did you guess this story ends somewhere over the gay-rights rainbow?
The narrative of her last chapter picks up in February when the Legislature passes SB 1062, a bill intended to protect the religious rights of business people, but defined by the left as a right to deny service to gays.
As Jan Brewer contemplated signing or vetoing the legislation, the biggest names in the Fortune 500 hurled their thunderbolts. Big business put down its marker: If you bar gays from the public square this won't be a social issue. It will be a huge economic issue for your state. And there will be pain.
After three days of enduring criticism, Brewer vetoed the legislation. Today she still bristles at the notion she dawdled. That "was irritating," she told the Arizona Capitol Times. "It was, 'Why did she take so long?' Come on. That's why you have five days to veto a bill is that you consider it, you try to be diligent about what you're doing."
Rebecca Wininger, president of Equality Arizona, isn't buying Brewer's newfound empathy for homosexuals. Gov. Brewer was responsible for curtailing gay rights when she signed a 2009 law that pulled back benefits from the domestic partners of state employees, she told Fischer.
Whether Brewer supports gay rights hardly matters. The full spectrum of those freedoms, including gay marriage, is coming to Arizona. Our state, like the rest of the country, is moving unmistakeably toward greater equality and tolerance. And young people are already there.
But it is worth noting that a lot of Arizonans misread this governor. They thought 13 seconds of dead air meant airhead. That SB 1070 meant unhinged.
And they were wrong. Jan Brewer may have rode SB 1070 into office, but it did not define her. Her policies in the end, from support of Proposition 100 to Medicaid expansion, proved anchored in two important way: Moderation and reality.
titled,editing: adamfoxie*
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