After the election I thought that the GOP would shift its stand on immigration in order to garner more Latino votes. But instead of throwing nativists under the bus, Republicans are blowing off anti-gay evangelicals and Mormons.
As the first Republican senator to endorse gay marriage, Rob Portman's announcement has added another prominent convert for equal marriage rights for all. It turns out Portman's son is gay.
There's an old saw: "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." These days, it should be: "A gay marriage proponent is a conservative whose child comes out." People like Portman are becoming legion, including Dick Cheney and Paul Singer, a wealthy Wall Street hedge fund manager whose gay son got married in Massachusetts.
This must be particularly galling for evangelical and Mormon opponents of gay marriage, because they basically handed George Bush the election in 2004, when court decisions allowing gay marriage brought opponents out in droves. In return Bush gave us the Iraq war debacle and the worst recession since the Depression.
Opposition of gay marriage is just another one of those "principled" moral stands that conservatives love to take, only to reverse themselves when it turns out to personally affect them and those they love. Like the recently reelected Tennessee Republican congressman Scott DesJarlais, who publicly opposes abortion, yet he urged both his wife and his mistress to have abortions. I guess we can add "a pro-choicer is a Republican congressman who knocks up his mistress" to the list of truisms.
Republicans should always have supported gay marriage, contraception coverage and abortion rights: they're the ones who keep saying that the government should stop messing with people's lives. What could be more private and personal than who you marry and whether you have children?
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