Jon Cowan and Evan Wolfson: A Quiet Shift in GOP Stance on Gay Marriage
[Jon Cowan is president and co-founder of Third Way, a moderate think tank, and Evan Wolfson is founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry.]
As the "tea party's" outsider challenge to Republican Party orthodoxy grabs headlines, another, quieter revolution is unfolding inside the GOP. This rebellion has at its heart a truly surprising issue, one that could have long-term consequences for the party: gay and lesbian couples' freedom to marry.
The latest evidence of this quiet revolution came with the release of the Republicans' midterm-campaign "Pledge to America." Though the pledge gives a perfunctory nod to "traditional marriage" (in a single line in a list of things, like "families," that it supports ), explicit opposition to marriage for same-sex couples is conspicuous in its absence. The document never uses the word "gay" (or "homosexual") — a stark contrast to past party platforms, which have made opposition to gay equality a centerpiece of their social agenda....
The GOP, in large part, isn't displaying its usual anti-gay election-year demagoguery, and not just in the "pledge." As recently as 1995, a Republican-controlled Congress was holding hearings investigating "homosexual recruitment" and the "promotion" of homosexuality. During the George W. Bush administration, the party used its fervent opposition to marriage for gay and lesbian couples as a get-out-the-vote strategy, encouraging more than a dozen anti-gay state ballot initiatives geared at driving turnout in the 2004 election and engineering repeated efforts to pass an amendment to the Constitution. This year is the first election year in recent history in which anti-gay rhetoric has been significantly muted: No state is facing an anti-gay initiative on the ballot, and marriage has not been a focus of the national conservative agenda....
Read entire article at LA Times
As the "tea party's" outsider challenge to Republican Party orthodoxy grabs headlines, another, quieter revolution is unfolding inside the GOP. This rebellion has at its heart a truly surprising issue, one that could have long-term consequences for the party: gay and lesbian couples' freedom to marry.
The latest evidence of this quiet revolution came with the release of the Republicans' midterm-campaign "Pledge to America." Though the pledge gives a perfunctory nod to "traditional marriage" (in a single line in a list of things, like "families," that it supports ), explicit opposition to marriage for same-sex couples is conspicuous in its absence. The document never uses the word "gay" (or "homosexual") — a stark contrast to past party platforms, which have made opposition to gay equality a centerpiece of their social agenda....
The GOP, in large part, isn't displaying its usual anti-gay election-year demagoguery, and not just in the "pledge." As recently as 1995, a Republican-controlled Congress was holding hearings investigating "homosexual recruitment" and the "promotion" of homosexuality. During the George W. Bush administration, the party used its fervent opposition to marriage for gay and lesbian couples as a get-out-the-vote strategy, encouraging more than a dozen anti-gay state ballot initiatives geared at driving turnout in the 2004 election and engineering repeated efforts to pass an amendment to the Constitution. This year is the first election year in recent history in which anti-gay rhetoric has been significantly muted: No state is facing an anti-gay initiative on the ballot, and marriage has not been a focus of the national conservative agenda....