When Will the GOP Face a Reckoning On Marriage Equality?

Andrew Sullivan has written on why marriage equality should be a conservative goal - and I have done the same in a VEER Magazine column - because of the stability and benefits that flow not only to the couples involved, but also to their families and the larger community. Despite this, the GOP continues to pander like a tawdry whore to the Christianists. When has to wonder when the ultimate reckoning will come given the rapidly growing acceptance of same sex marriage by the younger generations. A piece in the New Yorker looks at this issue and again makes the case as to why marriage equality should be a conservative value. Here are some excerpts:

Why isn’t gay marriage conservative? One would think that, at a certain point, there would be a real confrontation within the Republican Party about this—one that goes beyond its libertarian wing’s impatience with the subject. Do you want children to grow up in a home with married parents? Do you want adults who live together to make a binding commitment, one that helps weave them into their community? Are your party’s candidates and alleged intellectuals turning out books complaining about the absence of both of the above, books with titles like “It Takes a Family”? Would you like to help plan, attend, and dance at the wedding of your daughter, nephew, brother—or your own marriage? All of these people exist; so do their children. A wedding ring is the symbol of a transformative legal act, but it is not the sort of magic ring that conjures people out of nowhere or, pulled off, makes them invisible.

Perhaps that confrontation has begun, quietly enough, although the agreement of the G.O.P. Presidential candidates (other than Ron Paul) on the subject makes that harder to see.

And yet the legalization of gay marriage in New York State was eased by Republican Party donors who supported it and told Senators and assemblymen that they wouldn’t be abandoned financially. And, as the Times noted recently, they haven’t been—quite the opposite. . . . . The Washington bill was supported by Nike, Microsoft, and Starbucks—liberal-minded corporations on issues like this, maybe, but still corporations. But what may be more effective is the voter in the back of the auditorium who checks himself when he hears bitter talk about the supposed assault on marriage, because the words are no longer abstract, and because they seem unloving.

When policemen in Virginia barged into the bedroom of Richard and Mildred Loving, in 1958, there was a wedding certificate hanging on their wall. Because Richard was white and Mildred was black and Native American, the piece of paper marked them, in the eyes of the local government, as disreputable. . . . . They were forced to leave the state. The perversion of that position was recognized by the Supreme Court five years later, in a unanimous decision that overturned miscegenation laws.

Gay marriage may get to the court, but it’s looking as though it will stop in many statehouses along the way, and by then more marriage certificates will hang on more walls, recognized as something to honor.

Between the GOP position on contraception, the glorification of discrimination against those deemed "other," the anti-abortion extremism and the efforts to dehumanize LGBT citizens I have to wonder when the majority will wake up and throw the GOP on the trash heap of history.