Marriage Quote by Ben Nelson

"Let me be clear" is Washington code for the opposite: a verbal highlighter meant to disguise the messy coalition politics underneath. Ben Nelson’s line is built as a preemptive strike, a way to seize control of the frame before anyone else can define him. The construction is blunt on purpose. By reducing marriage to a tidy, supposedly neutral “definition,” Nelson turns a moral and constitutional fight into a semantics lesson, as if the stakes are merely about dictionary precision rather than human rights, family recognition, and state power.

The subtext is triangulation. Nelson, a conservative Democrat from Nebraska, is signaling to multiple audiences at once: to social conservatives, “I’m with you”; to party leadership, “Don’t force me into a vote that will cost you a seat”; to donors and national media, “I’m a moderate, not an ideologue.” The sentence performs centrism by sounding like common sense. “Union between a man and a woman” borrows the cadence of tradition, implying stability and normalcy while casting other arrangements as experimental or illegitimate without ever having to say so outright.

Context matters: this rhetoric peaked in the era when Democrats were splintered on same-sex marriage and “values” politics could swing elections. Nelson’s clarity is less about conviction than control - a disciplined sound bite designed for clips, mailers, and attack ads. It’s political risk management, packaged as certainty.