Hoover's Granddaughter - Think Carefully About Your Opposition to Gay Marriage

Margaret Hoover - whose grandfather, Herbert Hoover was clearly on the wrong side of history economically as the USA fell into the Great Depression - has an op-ed piece at Fox News that chides Republicans and so-called conservatives to think twice before they launch into further opposition of gay marriage. In the long term her piece makes perfect sense: the younger generations of voters support same sex marriage, so long term the issue is a loser. The question thus becomes one of whether or not the GOP/conservatives will put short turn opportunism and demagoguery ahead of long term common sense. So far, the GOP seems to care nothing about the long term view and would rather look to short term opportunities to gay bait and court a generation of voters that is literally dying off. Here are highlights from Hoover's column:
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As a conservative Republican representing the next generation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians, I encouraged the readers of FoxNews.com last January to take a careful look at the arguments and evidence in the Prop 8 trial, Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
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The case was presented by a constitutional conservative, Ted Olson, who helped found the Federalist Society, successfully argued Bush v. Gore to the Supreme Court (among fifty-five other cases), and was George W. Bush’s Solicitor General. Working with his Democratic legal partner David Boies, Olson sought to prove that marriage equality is a constitutional question, not a partisan issue.
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Among the seventeen witnesses Olson and Boies called to the stand were experts in areas of psychology, political science, economics, socio medical sciences and history. Economists testified to the economic harm caused to same-sex couples and their children; political scientists to their political vulnerability; sociologists and psychologists to the societal stigma associated with homosexuality; historians to the history of marriage shedding its discriminatory restrictions over time.
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Other testimony included Ryan Kendal, a young gay man who failed a “conversion therapy” attempt to alter his sexuality from gay to straight and the Republican Mayor of San Diego, a former police chief, who testified that “if government tolerates discrimination against anyone for any reason, it becomes an excuse for the public to do exactly the same thing.”
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Surprisingly, the defense’s two lone witnesses also offered compelling reasons to favor of marriage equality. They testified that allowing homosexuals to marry would increase family stability and improve the lives of their children; that sexual orientation is unchangeable; that gays and lesbians have faced a long history of discrimination, including Prop 8.
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The irony of this case is that Judge Walker is not a liberal activist judge but one whose career has proven him to be a tempered judge, true to the Reagan-Bush conservative jurisprudence that he was nominated to represent on the bench.
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The Supreme Court has previously ruled that the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right. When an unpopular minority is denied the right to marry, it is indeed the role of the courts to protect the rights of that minority, especially when a majority would deny them. This is why Judge Walker’s opinion reads, “That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”
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[C]onservatives have a flawed history with civil rights, a trend that began when Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. . . . The potential consequence that conservatives land on the wrong side of civil rights history again is the alienation of an entire generation of voters. With polling definitively indicating that Americans under age 30 overwhelmingly favor gay rights, with a majority supporting gay marriage according to the Pew Millennial Attitudes report published in February this year, there are multiple reasons for conservatives to think carefully before digging in their heels against gay marriage.

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It's a shame that Hoover seems light years ahead of Barack Obama on this issue.