Resisting Gay Marriage Is a Losing Battle for the GOP

Despite the fact that polls that show a majority of Americans support the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, many Republicans are pledging to oppose the ruling and GOP governors in Louisiana and Texas are giving cover to Clerk's who refuse to issue licenses to same sex couples, claiming that their "religious freedom" is being trampled upon.  Such arguments are a totally disingenuous twisting of what the First Amendment grants to citizens, but with the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP that simply doesn't matter.  A column in the Washington Post looks at why this is a losing battle for the GOP and will ultimately marginalize the party.  Here are excerpts:

After the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians adopted a strategy that became known as “massive resistance.” It doomed the South to a losing battle against not just the court but also a majority of Americans. 

Some GOP conservatives may be on the verge of making a similar mistake in the aftermath of the court’s ruling last week supporting same-sex marriage. At the very time moderate Republicans want to escape positions that isolate them from an increasingly diverse and tolerant country, some hard-right leaders seem ready to double down on a limiting version of “traditional values.”

Poll numbers show why defiance is likely to be a losing strategy. According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Americans support gay marriage. In the aftermath of the court’s decision, this number will probably grow, especially among the younger voters the GOP needs to attract. Among millennials, born after 1980, 73 percent support same-sex marriage.

Denunciations of the ruling came from some right-wing presidential candidates, such as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. “I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat,” he thundered.

Some moderate Republicans, such as Jeb Bush, straddled the issue, dissenting from the court but promising to uphold the law. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the ruling “tramples on states’ rights” and that “no earthly court” can alter God’s will, but added that he would comply with court orders.

Cruz’s language was so extreme that it seemed almost a call to ignore or disobey the court. “There is no obligation on others in government to accept the court as the final arbiter of every constitutional question,” Cruz said. Pressed by Inskeep, he affirmed that state officials “should feel no obligation to agree that the court ruling is right.” 

Such intemperate language may have been encouraged by the sneering tone of Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent.
These conservative ripostes recall the aggrieved language used by Southerners after the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was illegal. Conservatives asserted then the South’s deeply held values and way of life had been attacked. . . . . It took federal troops to eventually impose desegregation.

This is the dark American past toward which some far-right Republicans seem to want to steer their party. The problem is that court-bashing may be good politics for candidates seeking support from older, whiter, more religious voters in the crowded GOP field.

History tells us that intolerance is a losing bet in America, and that those who embrace defiance of the courts regret it later. The Richmond Times-Dispatch apologized to its readers in 2009 for its “editorial enthusiasm for a dreadful doctrine” a half-century before. “The record fills us with regret.” 

As I said, "conservative Christian" = modern day segregationist and racist.