Don’t let the brassy blond hair, blue eyes and big smile fool you: GOP hopeful Wendy Long is as vicious and anti-gay as her sister-in-Clairol Ann Coulter. In an interview, Long compared two people of the same sex tying the knot to her marrying her invalid mother or the family dog.But she didn’t mean anything nasty by it!

Long, one of three Republicans vying for Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s seat in New York, originally told right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham in August 2010 that the overturning of California’s Prop 8 in the courts would start America on a slippery slope where people would marry relatives and prized pooches.

“Who says I can’t marry my mother?” Long said to Ingraham. “You and I love our dogs. Who says we can’t marry our dogs?”

Um, because no dog would have you?

Of course now Long is running for office in a state that has marriage equality and she doesn’t want to look like quite such a spiteful harridan. So she tried to backpedal on Friday’s episode of Capitol Tonight.

Talking to Liz Benjamin, Long claimed she was merely putting on her lawyer cap and theorizing that if marriage wasn’t defined as between a man and a woman, there would be no barrier to Fido or Mr. Whiskers entering into the institution.

“I was just doing a legal analysis saying, you know, if you say there’s no rational basis for the voters to define marriage as between one man and one woman, you can’t really say there’s no rational basis for defining it some other way,” Long told me. “And, in my own personal life for example, someone very dear to me, whom I love very much, my mother, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease and was having terrible problems with health insurance. I loved her very much. I would have loved to have legally married her so that we could have cured a lot of her insurance problems.” “I was just saying there’s no rational basis to forbid me from doing that. So it was just a legal analysis. I wasn’t suggesting that we would have ended up with any of these other arrangements that we’re discussing.”

Well, we didn’t go to law school, but her argument makes very little sense—it sounds like it boils down to “if you change something then it won’t be the same anymore.”

Yes, that’s true—but laws are altered all the time and somehow the floodgates aren’t opened and chaos doesn’t reign supreme.

But seriously, Wendy, if you want to stand out in the June 26 Republican primary you’re gonna have to do better than say gay marriage leads to bestiality. Your chief rival, Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos, already said that.

Maragos also said he believed in evolution, so maybe you score some points by claiming cavemen rode dinosaurs through the fruited plains a few thousand years ago.



Photo: Beowulf Sheehan