Rubio’s ugliest moment: The mean-spirited ultimatum that showed the 2016 contender’s true colors [View all]

[highplainsdem]

From Salon's Luke Brinker this morning:

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/13/marco_rubios_ugliest_moment_the_mean_spirited_ultimatum_that_showed_the_2016_contenders_true_colors/

On June 11, 2013, the Russian parliament unanimously passed legislation prohibiting the dissemination of so-called gay propaganda, by which the Kremlin’s retrograde conservatives meant such heresies as the notions that gay and straight relationships are equally valuable, or that gay people enjoy any rights that the state is bound to respect. Signed into law by President Vladimir Putin later that month, the law stoked anti-gay vigilantism, with advocates reporting a spike in anti-LGBT harassment following the measure’s passage; harrowing videos of gay bashings captured the horrific climate of homophobia that both fostered the law and was exacerbated by it. Amid mounting anti-gay atrocities, record numbers of LGBT Russians sought to flee the country.

The same day that the Russian parliament declared war on gay citizens, Sen. Marco Rubio issued a headline-grabbing proclamation: The Florida Republican said he would jettison the immigration reform legislation he’d spent months helping craft if it included an amendment from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., allowing gay Americans to sponsor their foreign spouses for permanent residency — a right long afforded to heterosexual citizens. Leahy had introduced the amendment once, only to withdraw it amid political pressure, before reintroducing it once again on June 11.

But Rubio, who is slated to announce his 2016 presidential bid this evening, would have none of it.

“If this bill has in it something that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth, it kills the bill,” Rubio told Fox News personality Andrea Tantaros on her radio show. “I’m gone, I’m off it, and I’ve said that repeatedly. And I don’t think that’s going to happen, and it shouldn’t happen. This is already a difficult enough issue as it is.”

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