Staunton Newleader Endorses Gay Marriage in Virginia

Last week's gay marriage rulings will be placing more and more pressure on Virginia to move into the 21st century, especially with Maryland and the District of Columbia both having marriage equality just across the Potomac River.  The Christofascists led by The Family Foundation - which deserves a hate group designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center - and their  puppets in the Virginia Republican Party will resist, but the tide is inevitable, and some are calling on Virginia to change rather than ultimate face the ignominy of another ruling like that in Loving v. Virginia.  The Staunton News Leader is leading the call:

Last week’s gay rights victories in the Supreme Court leave Virginia with this question: Will ours be one of the last states to allow same-sex marriage?

It took another Supreme Court case – Loving v. Virginia in 1967 – to make interracial marriage legal across the country. We hope the Commonwealth is not such a high-profile holdout on this century’s marriage issue.

Gay marriage will eventually become the law of the entire land. Even social conservative Gov. Bob McDonnell recognized this . . . . 

Surely many Virginians agree with our local congressman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, in thinking that “preserving the institution of traditional marriage is crucial to the stability of our society and serves the best interest of American families.”

However, more and more of us cringe at statements like Goodlatte’s. A tradition that denies loving, committed, adult couples the privileges of marriage is a tradition our society has outgrown, much as we have segregation, forced though we were, again by the Supreme Court. Any implication that families created from gay marriages undermine “the stability of our society” is either ignorant or pandering to a segment of the population that claims to be conservative but, when it comes to social issues, is really about control over other people’s lives.

The term “family values” has been co-opted by social conservatives who want all families to look a certain way. Virginia is growing beyond this. We value all families. May our constitution soon reflect this progress.

Head hate merchant at The Family Foundation, Victoria Cobb, is likely acting like someone peed in her Cheerios if she's read this editorial.

Rachel Maddow: The GOP’s ‘Awkward’ Positions On "The Gay" WillSoon Come Crashing Down

As noted many times on this blog, some 20 to 25 years ago the Republican establishment decided that mobilizing the Christofascists would help the GOP win elections.  At the time, the powers that be in the GOP never stopped to ask the question of how, once these people have been allowed into the party grass roots, would the so-called establishment (i) control them and/or (ii) eject them from the party apparatus if their batshit craziness became a problem.    Now, the day of retribution is about to arrive and the GOP establishment seemingly has no plan on how to eject the most ignorant, nasty and hate-filled elements of today's GOO, the "godly Christian" crowd.  Rachel Maddow recently looked at the coming Armageddon for the GOP in terms of its virulently anti-gay platforms passed, of course, by the ugliest hate group elements of the GOP base.  Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement:

Rachel Maddow last night explored the “awkward” stance almost every Republican politician has taken on LGBT civil rights, which, she says, has “bewildered” the rest of America. Starting with Texas governor Rick Perry winning the war on the war on Christmas by signing a bill making it “not illegal” to say “Merry Christmas” in schools (a bill, by the way, that is likely unconstitutional — see our discussion here) to Ralph Reed‘s Faith & Freedom Coalition‘s “Road to Majority” conference this weekend, which, Maddow noted, mockingly, lobbied Congress this week “on the evils of gay marriage and the darkness that will be unleashed on the land if the court rules in a pro-gay way.”

But Republicans can no longer feel safe talking about gay people the way they have in the past, says Maddow.  “Republican politicians are about to lose the luxury of only talking about gay rights in front of anti-gay audiences like the Faith & Freedom Coalition, or avoiding the question altogether because they don’t want to be quoted about it because their Republican position on the subject is so unpopular,” the MSNBC anchor reveals.

“Because in Republican world — it is a very different world than most of us live in when it comes to talking about ‘The Gay,’” Maddow rightly notes.  Nobody who has any real prospects of being a national leader in Republican politics in the next few years has anything other than a 100 percent anti-gay policy position on something like non-discrimination,” Maddow added. “That is apparently still a requirement if you are a Republican and you want to hold higher national office.”.

But all that is about to change, and the ability to be anti-gay and continue to hold elected office will “come crashing down on the Republican Party,” Maddow predicts, when the Supreme Courts hands down its rulings on two historic marriage cases, Prop 8 and DOMA,  .  .  .  .  .

“After these rulings come out, this is going to be the biggest news in the country,” Maddow concluded. “They’re going to have to talk to the rest of the country, too, increasingly not only against them on these issues but bewildered by them and their positions on these issues.”

Like, Ken Blackwell who happens to be African-American and whose troubled past didn’t preclude him from being paid big bucks by the hate group Family Research Council, telling a Congressman if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the LGBT community there will be mass civil rights disobedience protests “reminiscent of the Civil Rights Movement,” nationwide.

One of the biggest problems for the GOP in my view as a former GOP activist is that the Party increasingly operates and exists in a bubble.  GOP members listen to Fox News and ignore real world news: they listen to the lies and false propaganda of anti-hate group; and they refuse to get out and converse with normal sentient individuals outside the Tea Party, Republican Women's Clubs and spittle flecked Christofascist circles.   The world and the nation's demographics are changing even if many in the GOP cling to the fantasy that we are still in the 1950's or early 1960's where the Clever family (Leave It to Beaver) and Anderson family (Father Knows Best) were supposedly the norm. 

I hope the Supreme Court Rulings whatever they may be turn out to be unsettling, cataclysmic events for both the GOP and the Christofascists.

Why the GOP has to get over Ronald Reagan

The irony is that given the characteristics - religious fanaticism and extremism in general - of the GOP base, Ronald Reagan could not win the for a state house race much less the nomination for the GOP presidential ticket.  Yet the knuckle draggers of the party base continue to feign worship to Reagan and his ideas.  And never mind that the challenges facing America in 2013 are far different from those back in 1980.  But for a party that claims a base and grassroots that is ever more detached from reality, none of these facts matter.  As noted earlier, the American Unity Fund recognizes that the GOP must change to survive, especially in terms of dropping its open anti-gay animus (even Nancy Reagan supports gay marriage according to her daughter).  A column in the Washington Post likewise makes the case that the GOP needs to face reality, get over Reagan and prepare itself for a far different world than over 30 years ago.   The columnists pleas will go unheeded by the spittle flecked members of the party base, but that fact doesn't make her argument less relevant.  Here are excerpts:

The unfailing reverence on the American right for Ronald Reagan is understandable. He was the only exemplar of modern conservatism to win the White House, and unlike liberal icons such as Roosevelt or Johnson or Obama, he presided over an economic boom and became beloved by voters not normally drawn to his party. No wonder that Reagan, long before his death in 2004, attained mythical status in the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

But that myth has become a burden for the modern GOP. It has bound Reagan’s followers on the right to policies and positions that were time-specific. The old guard has become convinced that Reagan’s solutions to the problems of his time were the essence of conservatism — not simply conservative ideas appropriate for that era.

Today’s Republican Party, however, faces legions of voters and candidates who came of age politically after Reagan’s eight years in office. An entire generation recalls him vaguely as a genial, optimistic president who stood up for America in the Cold War.

The Republican Party can remain a Ronald Reagan historical society, or it can try to endure as a force in national politics. But it can’t do both. The choice matters greatly, for there is no guarantee that the GOP will retain its ability to win national elections or that conservatism has a future as a national governing philosophy.

The Republican Party may survive, but only if its politicians, activists, donors and intellectuals rethink modern conservatism and find new issues to defend and new arguments with which to defend them. The public face of the GOP can no longer be aging, ill-tempered Reaganites such as John McCain and Jim DeMint but must give way to a diverse, media-savvy generation that understands the America we actually live in. Only then can the essence of conservatism — the promotion of personal liberty — survive, and the GOP along with it.

Mitt Romney seemed to be campaigning for the 1980 election, with attacks on welfare recipients and promises of greater defense spending and getting government off our backs.

In the months since Romney’s defeat, there has been a great deal of angst about the party’s future.  .   .  .  .  the problems are more serious than simply who is winning primary races. This is not a matter of individually competent candidates but of the GOP’s outdated worldview.

They confuse the Reagan-era expression of conservatism with conservatism itself. In clinging to it three decades later, the Republican Party has become not conservative but reactionary.

When Sen. DeMint (R-S.C.)decamped in January from Congress to a venerated conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, it was not to foster intellectual dialogue, innovation or self-examination. It was to be louder and more resolute on principles that voters had rejected in two national elections. Now DeMint fights innovation on immigration reform, same-sex marriage, economic policy and anything else that could propel the party out of the 1980s. He insists that the GOP’s problem is simply bad marketing.

[D]efenders of Republican orthodoxy have fought advocates of innovative conservative governance. On immigration, we see Rubio taking on DeMint, his former mentor. We see Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) endorsing gay marriage while social conservatives threaten to bolt the party. 


The fate of the party will be decided in the fight between those few who are determined to revive and rejuvenate conservatism and those who see such efforts as “selling out,” between those who would drag the party into the 21st century and those who would pull it back into the older, white, conservative enclaves that don’t care much for modernity. The new vanguard’s effort to redefine its party is the real story of the post-2012 GOP, and the party’s only hope for survival.

America is no longer Reagan’s America, and the world is no longer fighting the Cold War. A successful political party must not just acknowledge new realities but adjust to them, even embrace them.

[I]in this endeavor Republicans should recognize that America will not return to the pre-New Deal era. Limited government, not small government, must be the aim. That requires low taxes, not taxes that never increase. It requires modest regulation, but some regulation. And it acknowledges that the electorate expects government to solve problems, not merely stand aside. 

A modern GOP must also incorporate the national security lessons of the past 30 years, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring. That means adapting to the new face of jihadism — often radicalized individuals rather than al-Qaeda leaders. It means showing some common sense in intelligence-gathering but understanding that we cannot label every American who goes astray as an enemy combatant. 

I generally do not like the op-ed author, Jennifer Rubin, but in her analysis of what the GOP needs to do, she is on target.  Sadly, the party base will ignore her message and perhaps call her a RINO or leave her death threats.  That's how intellectually low and extremist the GOP base has become.  An I say this as a former GOP activist who held a city committee position for 8 years.