Former Florida governor and 2016 hopeful Jeb Bush remains pretty lukewarm about marriage equality coming to the Sunshine State this week, saying he still thinks the issue should be in the hands of voters.
The Miami Herald reports:
“It ought be a local decision. I mean, a state decision,” the former governor said Sunday in a brief interview. “The state decided. The people of the state decided. But it's been overturned by the courts, I guess.”
The paper also provides some background on Bush's mixed record on LGBT rights over the years:
As governor, he was against same-sex marriage but wasn't publicly enthusiastic about the successful 2008 campaign to rewrite the Florida Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Bush, who left office in 2007, said the change wasn't needed, since state law already restricted marriage to heterosexual couples. Two years ago, he suggested in a PBS interview that gay parents could be held up as role models, even as he said “traditional marriage is what should be sanctioned” by the government.
In the 2012 interview, Bush told Charlie Rose that “if people love their children with all their heart and soul and that's what they do and that's how they organize their life, that should be held up as an example to others, because we need it.” In a speech to a Republican group last year, Bush warned against being a party seen as against too many things, including being “anti-gay.”
