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GOP Pollster: Republicans Are Wrong on Ending Same Sex Marriage

Evangelicals comprise 23% of the U. S. population with more that half living in the South and 55% being 50 years of age or older (Republicans make up only 28% of the population while Independents make up 43% and Democrats are at 28%).  Meanwhile, 29 percent of the U. S. population espouses no religious affiliation. Yet, the white "Christian" nationalists behind Project 2025 want to inflict the beliefs of this declining minority of the population on the nation as a whole. These architects of Project 2025, want to restore white male privilege, undermine women's rights, reverse LGBT rights, and I suspect, if they could, bring back Jim Crow laws. Sadly, far too many Republicans are only too willing to prostitute themselves to this hate and bigotry driven minority rather than face a a potential primary challenge.  A guest column in the New York Times by a Republican pollster argues that Republicans pandering to Christofascists and supportive of ending same sex marriage have it wrong and are misreading the American public's views and support for same sex marriage, especially among younger voters who will increasing come to dominate the voting public.   Here in Virginia the GOP extremist gubernatorial candidate is ignoring the reality of the situation with her desire to end same sex marriage.  These are column highlights:

Almost 10 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage would be legal across the country. Today, sensing a political shift toward socially conservative policy, Republican policymakers in states from Michigan to Tennessee have begun proposing bills that would roll back same-sex marriage.

These lawmakers may discover to their dismay that they have the politics of the issue quite wrong. Though the cultural winds have shifted on many issues, Republican voters are not clamoring for an unraveling of same-sex marriage rights. Republican voters have objected to socially progressive policies that they believe incur a cost to themselves or others, but the experience over the past decade with legal same-sex marriage has persuaded many in the party that it is nothing to be feared.

Polls of American voters generally show support for same-sex marriage rising over the past three decades, both before and after the Obergefell decision. A whopping 68 percent of Americans said they supported legal recognition of same-sex marriages, according to a Gallup poll from last month. Younger voters, a demographic courted by Donald Trump in his recent presidential campaign, are typically the most supportive of gay rights; indeed, some of those who voted for the first time in 2024 may have scarce memory of a time when same-sex marriage was not the law of the land.

Among Republicans, the story is admittedly more complicated. There has been a backsliding of support for same-sex marriage among Republicans in recent years, but surveys differ on whether this is a blip or a full-fledged reversal. While Gallup shows a 14-point decline in support among Republicans for same-sex marriage since 2022, my surveys have shown Republican support for legal same-sex marriage bouncing back above its pre-2022 levels, from 40 percent in 2022 to 43 percent in 2023 to 48 percent in 2024.

There are two main lines of argument that seem to resonate most strongly with Republicans on preserving same-sex marriage: Live and let live, and leave well enough alone.

Republicans remain very open to the idea that the government should not be in the business of meddling with or punishing people because they are gay or lesbian. In polling I conducted with a coalition of Republican pollsters on behalf of Centerline Liberties and Project Right Side, published Friday morning, roughly 78 percent of Republicans surveyed said that “what two consenting adults do in their personal lives is none of my business — and it shouldn’t be the government’s either.” Government is already “too big and intrusive” was a convincing argument in support of legal same-sex marriage, according to the survey.

Republican voters seem to have made a distinction between the “L.G.B.” and the “T.” They continue to strongly oppose things like the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports — a topic on which a majority of Americans agree with them. However, when it comes to same-sex marriage, people appear to feel little or no imposition on the lives of others. Same-sex couples can live and thrive in communities side by side with heterosexual married couples harmoniously. Live and let live.

But even setting aside the arguments in favor of same-sex marriage on the merits, there are legal and political considerations that even more skeptical Republicans understand.

The reality is that there is little political passion or momentum on the side of opposition to legal same-sex marriage. It has been in place for a decade (or longer in states that embraced it before Obergefell). Families have been established, and gains have been made that people will be loath to give up. As millennials and Generation Z voters become a larger slice of the electorate, the political viability of opposing same-sex marriage will continue to evaporate. Republicans will recognize that this is an issue where trying to undo what has been done would be a losing strategy.

Many survey respondents in my recent polling mentioned personal interactions with same-sex married couples in their lives to explain their support for same-sex marriage, using words like “love” and “family.”

Republican policymakers should not misread the moment. Both as a matter of political prudence and as a matter of embracing personal freedom, when it comes to same-sex marriage Americans should be allowed to live and let live.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The Myth of the Gen Z Red Wave

As noted a number of times in previous posts, the Felon and congressional Republicans continue to claim they have a mandate to enact their white "Christian" nationalist agenda and huge tax cuts to the very wealthy which will be funded by draconian cuts to social programs that benefit the many, including younger voters.  They ignore the reality that the Felon received the votes of only slightly more than a third of registered voters and received less than 50% of all votes cast.  Moreover, cuts to Medicaid, changes to Social Security and restrictions on Obamacare will adversely impact countless younger voters, including working class whites who may have been motivated by economic concerns - particularly inflation fears - and not just their hatreds and prejudices and an embrace of conservatism. In addition, younger voters are the least religious of any generation, are more likely to identify as LGBT, and more progressive on numerous issues, so a negative reaction to the implementation of the Christofascist agenda of Project 2025 is entirely possible.  In short, predictions of Democrats losing the younger generations of voters may well be both false and premature as laid out in a piece at The Atlantic.  Thus, overreach by the Felon and his self-prostituting political whores in the ranks of congressional Republicans may alienate the younger voters they reached in a one off election.  One can only hope the backlash occurs quickly.  Here are article highlights:

Are the kids all right-wing? Donald Trump won the 2024 election thanks in part to increased support from young voters. Some experts see this as a sign of a generational sea change. As the prominent Democratic data scientist David Shor pointed out in a recent podcast conversation with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, 75-year-old white men were more likely to support the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, than 20-year-old white men were.

If Shor is right—if Gen Z (now ages 12 to 30) is durably to the right of previous generations—a significant part of the Democratic coalition is gone. Luckily for the party, however, he probably isn’t. The best available evidence suggests that the youth-vote shift in 2024 was more a one-off event than an ideological realignment.

The Cooperative Election Study, one of the largest politically focused surveys of Americans, goes back to 2006 and just released its 2024 data. Those data aren’t perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like Shor’s. The CES is also more comprehensive than the average election poll, asking about voters’ ideological self-identification, party affiliation, and views on specific issues.

Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020. . .

But voting for a Republican candidate isn’t the same as identifying as conservative. Here is where the CES data cast doubt on the notion that Gen Z is an especially right-leaning generation. According to my analysis of the CES data, young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent).

What about young adults’ positions on specific political issues? For the most part, they are more liberal than previous generations. . . . In the 2024 CES survey, 69 percent of young adults supported granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of felony crimes and who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, up from 58 percent in 2012, the last year all 18-to-29-year-olds were Millennials. Also in the 2024 survey, 63 percent agreed that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class,” up from 42 percent in 2012. Support for legal abortion among young adults rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2024, though the question was worded somewhat differently in those two years. Only one belief shifted in the conservative direction: 62 percent of young adults in 2024 supported increasing border patrols at the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 45 percent in 2012.

The trend looks different if we look at data on partisanship rather than ideology. The Democratic Party has steadily been losing market share among young adults since 2008, mostly because young people have grown likelier to identify as independents; Gen Z is only slightly more Republican than Millennials were at the same age. These young independents tend to vote for Democrats, but, given their lack of party affiliation, their votes are more likely to swing from one election to the next. Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn’t in 2020.

Given that young voters have not become more likely to identify as conservative or hold broadly conservative political opinions, Gen Z might not be the disaster for Democrats that Shor and others are predicting. The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people’s deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change.

Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation. . . . . Young Americans today are also unconvinced that their country is anything special: Only 27 percent of high-school seniors think the U.S. system is “still the best in the world,” down from 67 percent in the early 1980s, according to a long-running national survey.

If young people’s attitudes persist as they get older, Gen Z might never be pleased with how things are going in the country. They’ll want to “vote the bastards out” in the next election no matter which party is in power. Compared with the idea of a new and persistent conservatism in young voters, a generalized pessimism bodes better for the Democrats in 2026 or 2028. But if Democrats regain power, Gen Z might turn on them once again, repeating the cycle in an endless loop of political dissatisfaction.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Corporate America Is Abandoning the LGBT Community

Today is Hampton Roads Pride's main Pride event in downtown Norfolk's Town Point Park, complete with a boat parade.   The event is a reminder of how much things have improved from when I first came out of the closet.  When I came out of the closet almost 25 years ago, the event was tiny and tucked away in the back of Lafayette Park out of sight, there was no same sex marriage, in Virginia the sodomy statute subjected same sex relations to potential felony charges, and there were no state or federal non-discriminations protections.  Yet with the Felon pushing the Project 2025 white "Christian" nationalist agenda to silence or even erase anyone who basically is not a right wing white Christofascist many, including myself, worry that all the gains made may be lost and ponder if those who can should consider moving overseas to safer, more welcoming countries (personally, the issue is where to go and how do we get our children and grandchildren out of an increasingly ugly America). Adding to such worries is the reality that much of corporate America that courted the LGBT dollar are proving to have been fair weather friends/allies only out to tap into the pink dollar (a piece at JP Morgan Wealth Management estimates the global LGBT purchasing power is $4.7 trillion while the U.S. LGBT purchasing power is likely over $1 trillion).  Faced with potential threats from the Felon's anti-diversity, anti-equity and anti-inclusion agenda and MAGA world's "anti-woke" fixation, many large corporate donors to Pride events and other LGBT organizations have either cut or reduced funding - better to alienate LGBT community members than face threats from the knuckle dragging MAGA provocateurs.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the unsettling situation: 

I remember the heady days when Out magazine, which I edited from 2006 to 2018, would swell each June for L.G.B.T.Q. Pride month, its pages thick with ads. Our offices became cluttered with vodka bottles emblazoned in Pride flags, sneakers in rainbow hues, underwear so festively gay that they might as well have come with a parade permit. That deployment of marketing budgets to support the gay community became known as rainbow capitalism, and for a time it became a good business.

Maybe we were naïve. The forces that once propelled corporate America into the arms of L.G.B.T.Q. America have pivoted, retreating under the weight of political backlash and the calculus of risk aversion. The pink pandering hasn’t gone away entirely, but the Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has turned Pride from a brightly colored bandwagon for brands to jump on into a possible liability — or worse, a political statement.

Consider BarkBox, a purveyor of pet toys and treats, whose leaked internal message in early June laid bare the new corporate zeitgeist: “We’ve made the decision to pause all paid ads and life cycle marketing pushes for the Pride kit effective immediately,” it read, adding, “We need to acknowledge that the current climate makes this promotion feel more like a political statement than a universally joyful moment for all dog people.”

What was once “universally joyful” is now, apparently, divisive. As if Pride were ever meant to be apolitical. The corporate retreat comes at a moment when pressure to reverse marriage equality is growing. This month the Southern Baptist Convention, emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, set its sights on Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationally 10 years ago next week. What a way to mark an anniversary.

BarkBox is no titan of industry, but such skittishness is echoed by giants. Garnier, Skyy Vodka, Mastercard, Anheuser-Busch, Diageo, PepsiCo, Comcast, Citi and PricewaterhouseCoopers have all slashed their Pride commitments this year, fleeing the parades they once clamored to sponsor.

Target, long a mainstay of rainbow capitalism, seems to be trying to revive a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” by trying to have it both ways: still a sponsor of New York City Pride but asking organizers to keep their involvement on the down low.

The retreat didn’t come out of nowhere. The warning shots were fired in 2023, after Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch, teamed up with the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a sponsored Instagram post timed to the end of March Madness. The backlash was swift and theatrical. Kid Rock filmed himself shooting up packs of the beer with a rifle. The conservative troll Ben Shapiro posted a 12-minute rant. Donald Trump chimed in. “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game,” he posted. “Money does talk — Anheuser-Busch now understands that.”

It did. This March, Anheuser-Busch pulled out of Pride sponsorships, including marquee events like San Francisco Pride and St. Louis PrideFest. . . . In New York about a quarter of corporate donors have canceled or scaled back, leaving organizers to plug a $750,000 gap. Pride events in Washington, St. Louis and Salt Lake City have also faced sponsorship drops.

The rise and fall of rainbow capitalism is instructive. When I was hired as editor in chief of Out in 2006, the normalization of gay people was already well underway in popular culture. (The eighth season of “Will & Grace” was on the air.) Nine years later, the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, a decision that seemingly also enshrined the right of L.G.B.T.Q. people to be a consumer category to be catered to.

But here’s the thing about marketing campaigns: They seek to move product, not the culture. And when the culture goes in another direction, as it has especially since Mr. Trump was elected again, corporate allyship becomes corporate snubbing.

This backing off underscores what some critics have long argued: that multinational brands have flattened queer identity into bland consumerism. Queer activists have long pushed back against the corporatization of Pride.

But if Pride editions of Listerine and Oreos seemed frivolous, they also reflected how far society had come since Karl Rove used same-sex marriage ballot initiatives as a boogeyman to turn out the conservative base in swing states in the aughts. What does it say about society if Bud no longer feels safe being publicly pro-L.G.B.T.Q.?

For the best part of two decades queer activists exploited social media to shame corporate America for its historic neglect of L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Mostly that was a good thing. But Twitter also drove outrage to excess.

Did we help ourselves by piling on a carrot juice company or when we freaked out in 2013 about Barilla pasta when its chairman said he wouldn’t feature gay families in ads? GLAAD’s response to the Barilla chairman’s statement: a solemn suggestion that consumers would switch to “more inclusive brands like Bertolli,” because, you know, pasta must be progressive, too.

It’s hard not to see those campaigns now as a template for how the MAGA movement responded to Anheuser-Busch and Dylan Mulvaney. The conservative backlash to queer visibility is uglier by far, but it’s following the same script, compounded by our growing inability to reason and rationalize. Truth is very often the first casualty.

That’s what makes this year’s retreat so revealing: It’s not just a loss of funding but also a reminder that acceptance was always provisional. . . . Strides made yesterday can be reversed tomorrow.

With Mr. Trump back in office, the era of rainbow capitalism seems well and truly over. Corporations are, by their nature, opportunistic. They go where the money is. How else to explain why Coinbase, Coca-Cola, Walmart, ScottsMiracle-Gro and Goldman Sachs helped sponsor the Army anniversary parade last Saturday — in effect a MAGA pride parade?

For this to be the moment when corporate America steps back from Pride initiatives is to add salt in the wound. But is downsizing Pride so terrible? . . . . A leaner, meaner Pride won’t have the branded sheen of rainbow capitalism, but it could rediscover its teeth. Even better, it would sort out true allies from fair-weather friends. A little adversity goes a long way. We can manage just fine without the baubles of pinkwashing.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty