One would think, considering all the backlash thrown at retired neurosurgeon and fellow 2016 GOP contender Ben Carson after his own “gay people = pedophiles” snafu a few years back, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker would have avoided that easy to spot minefield…
But this is Walker’s first presidential race and as such he’s still learning the ropes on how to carefully craft his homophobic bigotry in a way that riles up the right-wing base while still being soft and sugary enough for the general electorate to swallow.
Walker has thus now attempted to “clarify” his earlier remarks that he supports the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay adults because it somehow “protected children.”
The New York Times reports:
In comments published on Tuesday by The Independent Journal Review, a news website that is popular with young conservatives, Mr. Walker, a former Eagle Scout, said, “I have had a lifelong commitment to the Scouts and support the previous membership policy because it protected children and advanced Scout values.” Yet during a brief news conference in South Carolina on Wednesday, Mr. Walker said that he was not pushing to save the ban — “it’s up to the Boy Scouts” — and that his earlier remarks were not about protecting children from gay people.
“The protection was not a physical protection,” he said, but rather about “protecting them from being involved in the very thing you’re talking about right now, the political and media discussion about it, instead of just focusing on what Scouts is about, which is about camping and citizenship and things of that nature.”
Are you buying what Walker is selling?
