Although Daniels lacks extensive experience in Washington, he has achieved surprising influence in the gay-marriage debate, because he came to it so early. During the first years of this Bush Administration, while most social conservatives worried about stem-cell research and abortion, Daniels engineered the drafting of the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage nationwide. By the end of last year he had persuaded more than a hundred representatives to co-sponsor the bill.
What makes Daniels's strategy such a good fit for compassionate conservatism is his pragmatism. According to Daniels, marriage between men and women is a "transcendent, immemorial institution." But whereas most conservatives condemn homosexuality as a biblical sin, Daniels understands that the public's tolerance needs to be taken into account. Accordingly, Daniels says, he crafted the FMA to ban gay marriage while leaving intact California's domestic-partnership rights and Vermont's civil-union law (some liberals argue that its language would invalidate civil unions). And although Daniels has a contentious style and a booming voice, which becomes even louder when he inveighs against gay marriage, he is careful not to condemn gays themselves.
Signing on to Daniels's approach would seem to allow Bush once again to throw a bone to his conservative base while positioning himself as a moderate. But in this instance the evangelical right may not take the bone. Although it has gone along with Bush's breaches of conservative ideology in many cases (his decisions to levy steel tariffs, to drop school vouchers, to add a new federal entitlement in the form of the Medicare drug benefit), signs are that gay marriage will be different. According to Paul Weyrich, the head of the Free Congress Foundation, an influential conservative lobbying group, "I have yet to see the movement as energized as it is over defense of marriage." Daniels's own experience shows how unwilling the far right is to compromise on this issue. Instead of being hailed for his success in promoting the Federal Marriage Amendment (which would, after all, achieve one of the far right's main objectives), he has been denounced as a sellout and an enemy of the movement. "He is a disaster," one prominent social conservative told me bluntly. If Daniels is a bellwether, gay marriage seems likely to emerge as the issue that defines the political limits of compassionate conservatism. And it could test whether social conservatives can win popular support for their positions by framing issues in secular, rather than religious, terms.
Daniels often waxes lyrical about the virtues of traditional marriage—marriages of men and women, who become fathers and mothers—but he is describing a model that he himself experienced only briefly. He was born in 1963, the only child of Irish parents living in Spanish Harlem. His father, Guy, was a published poet and had translated the works of the Russian authors Vladimir Mayakovsky and Andrei Sakharov. He was also a fickle husband, bolting from one marriage to the next. Guy left the family when Matt was three. Matt's mother worked as a secretary and provided a stable home. But during the 1970s the neighborhood became a morass of crime and drugs. "I was mugged probably twenty times by the time I got to college," Daniels told me when we spoke recently. One evening in 1971, his mother was attacked by four men, who left her with a broken back. Unable to work, she grew dependent on welfare, and on alcohol. The family's prospects for a better life dwindled.