It’s 2015, and the American public has decisively accepted marriage equality.
The recent polling is unequivocal. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll pegged support for same-sex marriage at 59 percent, versus just 33 percent for those opposing equality. In the latest CBS News poll, it was 60 percent for to 35 percent against, and CNN has it at 63 percent to 36 percent.
{mosads}In a similar vein, when Bloomberg asked whether sexual orientation should be protected from discrimination like race, the numbers were an eye-popping 74 percent to 18 percent.
Yet amazingly, Republican politicians still can’t get on the right side of public opinion when it comes to the rights of gay Americans.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence caused an uproar a few weeks ago when he signed a bill enabling discrimination so blatant that even NASCAR was offended.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) proclaimed last week in his announcement that he’s running for president that “yesterday is over,” yet you wouldn’t know it given his retrograde stance on equality: “Thousands of years of human history have taught us that the ideal setting for children to grow up in is with a mother and a father committed to each other.” So thousands of years of human history aren’t over, but yesterday is?
A spokeswoman for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says her boss’s continued bigoted opposition to equality is “the same position taken by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden until 2012.” Even if one accepts that dubious assertion, those three Democrats have evolved. Huckabee hasn’t. And what happens to those who don’t evolve? Ask the dinosaurs.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) claims he’s a libertarian, but at the same time he describes himself as an “old-fashioned traditionalist” who supports the “historical definition” of marriage. Perhaps the best label is “confused.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is an unabashed Neanderthal: “Traditional marriage is an institution whose integrity and vitality are critical to the health of any society,” he wrote in October. Yet civil society hasn’t collapsed in the 37 states that have embraced marriage equality.
Conservative Ben Carson certainly subscribes to the “dooom!” theory of marriage equality: “[I]f we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.” Suffice it to say he won’t be replacing Edward Gibbon and Plutarch in Roman history courses.
And while Republicans might still be searching for justification for their bigotry, no rationalization is crazier than the one from appellate lawyer Gene Schaerr. Summarizing an argument made in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, he writes, “A reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women. And based on past experience, institutionalizing same-sex marriage poses an enormous risk of reduced opposite-sex marriage rates.”
So according to non-existent “past experience”: (A) Same-sex marriage is bad because the purpose of marriage is to have babies, and (B) same-sex marriage causes women to eschew marriage in favor of aborting fetuses.
Apparently when you defend the indefensible, logic goes out the window.
For a Republican Party struggling to remain relevant to the American mainstream, the fact that it can’t let go of its marriage bigotry is telling. Republicans remain in thrall to a tiny, hateful, fringe minority as the rest of America passes them by.
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.