How Republicans Lost the Culture War

In the wake of last week's amazing developments on the marriage equality front, Christofascists and professional Christians are shrieking and spraying sheets of spittle flying as they seem to be slowly grasping that they have indeed lost the culture wars.  Ironically, their unhinged rants help explain why they and the GOP have lost the culture wars: the larger public has come to recognize that they hate virtually everyone but themselves, that they are the epitome of hypocrisy and that a majority of "social conservatives" are flaming racists to boot.  In short, these folks are NOT nice people and they pose a threat to the civil rights of others.  A piece in Politico lays out in more detail how the GOP and its religious extremist elements lost the culture war.  Here are highlights:

On Aug. 17, 1992, Pat Buchanan and the Republican Party declared a "culture war  . . .for the soul of America."  On Oct. 6, 2014, Republicans surrendered.

Twenty-two years ago at his party’s national convention, Buchanan thundered, “we stand with [President George H. W. Bush] against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” This week, nearly every Republican and conservative movement leader stood quietly as the Supreme Court effectively extended equal marriage rights to more than half of the country. Stunned, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee lashed out at his party’s silence, “go ahead and just abdicate on this issue … I’ll become an independent. I’ll start finding people that have guts to stand.” But he doesn’t seem to have many takers.

How did the party of “the real America” get so utterly thumped in the culture war, a war of its own choosing? People will tell you the defeat is due to the "Rising American Electorate" of African-American, Latino, youth and single women voters, which made up nearly half of the 2012 turnout and voted 2-to-1 for Obama. But it’s not a mere matter of demographics shifting under the Republicans’ feet. The GOP sowed the seeds of its culture war demise with three big strategic blunders.

1. Republicans stopped being savvy on abortion.

A warning sign that anti-abortion activists can push things too far flashed in 2006, when South Dakota voters repealed at a state law enacted earlier that year banning all abortions.

Yet when the ideological pendulum swung back to the left with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Republicans failed to stick with the incremental, sometimes stealthy, approach that allowed social conservatives to make advancements despite a Democratic White House in the 1990s. Conservative state legislators turned “informed consent” into “mandated transvaginal ultrasounds.” Primary voters eagerly elevated candidates opposed to all abortions without exception, including two 2012 Senate nominees who explicitly defended forcing rape victims to carry out their pregnancies. Both proceeded to lose in states that Mitt Romney won.

[I]n the states that determine who controls Congress, the tables have been turned. Now the Democrats are the ones who can pound their opponent’s weak spots on abortion. Even in reddish North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan is holding a gender gap-fueled lead by opposing a 20-week ban and hammering her Republican rival on abortion restrictions he helped clear the state legislature.

2. Republicans got weird about birth control.

When Mitt Romney couldn’t succinctly answer a 2012 primary debate question about whether states should be able to ban contraception, Republicans blamed the media for raising an irrelevant question. Not only was the question relevant—“personhood” amendments had already been considered at the state level, and more were to come—Romney’s fumble foreshadowed his party’s inexplicable difficulty to handle an issue that had been long put to bed.

Republican squeamishness with birth control is hard to figure. Surveys show that 99 percent of women under 45 who have sex with men will, at least some of the time, use birth control. Any competent politician would try to get in good with the 99 percent, not the 1 percent.

3. Republicans bet wrong on gay marriage.

After 2000, Bush political strategist Karl Rove fretted that 4 million Christian conservatives stayed home on Election Day. After 2003, many on the right were in a panic once the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court established equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. In 2004, Republicans responded by spearheading ballot initiatives in 11 states banning same-sex marriage, including the swing states of Ohio and Michigan. Rove may not have masterminded it, but he told the Ohio media he believed the initiative would boost Republican turnout.

Republicans won the battle, but they soon lost the war. . . . With a little more foresight and a little less bigotry, Republicans could have realized that misguided cultural attitudes toward gays would naturally diminish over time, and divined better ways to rally the conservative troops. There were plenty of signs that Republicans were on the wrong side of history. The vice president’s daughter was openly gay. The TV show “Will & Grace” was in its sixth season. Even Bush sensed that a hateful anti-gay stance could drive away swing voters: One week before Election Day, he expressed support for civil unions.

It was too little too late. Republicans never launched an organized push for civil unions as a way to compete for gay voters without alienating religious conservatives who wanted to cordon off marriage for heterosexuals.

[Republicans chose] to stand athwart history yelling “Stop.” It backfired. Support for gay marriage, now a clear majority, has jumped 15 points in five years and will surely continue to rise. Indeed, on issue after cultural issue, Republican positions poll miserably, especially with younger voters.

[I]t was not preordained for Republicans to lose the culture war so completely. Bad strategic choices of their own making boxed them in a corner, leaving them no choice but to surrender at the courthouse steps.