Prominent Republicans Sign Brief in Support of Gay Marriage

Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, Tony Perkins and other professional Christians who enrich themselves by disseminating anti-gay hate are going to be ever so pissed at a new development:  dozens of prominent Republicans have signed a brief supporting the right of gays to marry and asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down Proposition 8.  While Bobby Jindal and others in the GOP refuse to acknowledge that anti-gay policies are toxic for the GOP's long term viability, the Republicans who signed this brief can see reality and know that they must support equality in the long term or perish.  Here are highlights from a New York Times piece:

Dozens of prominent Republicans — including top advisers to former President George W. Bush, four former governors and two members of Congress — have signed a legal brief arguing that gay people have a constitutional right to marry, a position that amounts to a direct challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner and reflects the civil war in the party since the November election. 

The document will be submitted this week to the Supreme Court in support of a suit seeking to strike down Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative barring same-sex marriage, and all similar bans. 

The Proposition 8 case already has a powerful conservative supporter: Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under Mr. Bush and one of the suit’s two lead lawyers. The amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief is being filed with Mr. Olson’s blessing. It argues, as he does, that same-sex marriage promotes family values by allowing children of gay couples to grow up in two-parent homes, and that it advances conservative values of “limited government and maximizing individual freedom.” 

Legal analysts said the brief had the potential to sway conservative justices as much for the prominent names attached to it as for its legal arguments. The list of signers includes a string of Republican officials and influential thinkers — 75 as of Monday evening — who are not ordinarily associated with gay rights advocacy, including some who are speaking out for the first time and others who have changed their previous positions. 

Among them are Meg Whitman, who supported Proposition 8 when she ran for California governor; Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York; Stephen J. Hadley, a Bush national security adviser; Carlos Gutierrez, a commerce secretary to Mr. Bush; James B. Comey, a top Bush Justice Department official; David A. Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director; and Deborah Pryce, a former member of the House Republican leadership from Ohio who is retired from Congress.  .  .  .  .  Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor, who favored civil unions but opposed same-sex marriage during his 2012 presidential bid, also signed.

[T]he presence of so many well-known former officials — including Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, and William Weld and Jane Swift, both former governors of Massachusetts — suggests that once Republicans are out of public life they feel freer to speak out against the party’s official platform, which calls for amending the Constitution to define marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.” 

In making an expansive argument that same-sex marriage bans are discriminatory, the brief’s signatories are at odds with the House Republican leadership, which has authorized the expenditure of tax dollars to defend the 1996 marriage law. The law defines marriage in the eyes of the federal government as the union of a man and a woman. 

Experts say that amicus briefs generally do not change Supreme Court justices’ minds. But on Monday some said that the Republican brief, written by Seth P. Waxman, a former solicitor general in the administration of President Bill Clinton, and Reginald Brown, who served in the Bush White House Counsel’s Office, might be an exception. 

Tom Goldstein, publisher of Scotusblog, a Web site that analyzes Supreme Court cases, said the amicus filing “has the potential to break through and make a real difference.” 

He added: “The person who is going to decide this case, if it’s going to be close, is going to be a conservative justice who respects traditional marriage but nonetheless is sympathetic to the claims that this is just another form of hatred. If you’re trying to persuade someone like that, you can’t persuade them from the perspective of gay rights advocacy.”

Yes indeed, the spittle will be flying in sheets in hate group offices around the country.  The GOP needs to accept the reality that the battle against gay marriage is futile.  Meanwhile, I continue to believe that the GOP cannot be saved until the Christofascists are driven from the party and exiled to the political wilderness where they belong.

Signs of Some Intelligent Life in the GOP

Even though the base of the Republican Party has increasingly become dominated by knuckle dragging Neanderthals and unhinged religious fanatics, speeches at the Log Cabin Republican convention over the weekend by Meghan McCain and Christie Todd Whitman suggest that not all intelligent life has yet fled the GOP. Both came out in support of same sex marriage and urged the GOP to move forward instead of trying to hang on to the fast slipping away past. With younger voters overwhelmingly identifying with the Democrat Party and supporting gay marriage, if the GOP doesn't wish to become today's equivalent of the Whig Party, it must change course and move with society. Whether and how McCain, Whitman and other non-theocrats can regain control of the GOP remains to be seen. A look at McCain's remarks correctly identifies one of the major problems with the GOP: Most people are ready to move on to the future, not live in the past, but most of the old school Republicans "are scared shitless of that future." Here are some highlights from the Daily Beast:

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People in our country have much more important issues to deal with on a daily basis. But the experience did reinforce what I learned on the campaign trail in some major ways. I’ll summarize them in three points:
1. Most of our nation wants our nation to succeed.
2. Most people are ready to move on to the future, not live in the past.
3. Most of the old school Republicans are scared shitless of that future.

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I feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes. There are those who think we can win the White House and Congress back by being “more” conservative. Worse, there are those who think we can win by changing nothing at all about what our party has become. They just want to wait for the other side to be perceived as worse than us. I think we’re seeing a war brewing in the Republican party, but it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past. I believe most people are ready to move on to that future.

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Christie Todd Witman went even further and spoke out directly about the need for the GOP to separate religion from the civil laws. This is precisely the issue that first caused me to leave the GOP even before the advent of the Chimperator's fool's errand war in Iraq and his administration's trashing of the Constitution. Here are highlights of Whitman's remarks on this issue which no doubt will have the Christianists writhing with fits:

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The government should have no say about marriage, and the plank in the Republican Party platform that calls for preserving marriage between a man and a woman should be scrapped, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R) told CNSNews.com. Furthermore, the U.S. military should not differentiate between homosexuals and heterosexuals, said Whitman. The former governor spoke Friday at the Log Cabin Republicans’ (LCR) 2009 convention and symposium in Washington, D.C.

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“Well, I am somebody who believes in the separation of church and state and that the government, frankly, ought to be out of the business of marriage entirely,” Whitman told CNSNews.com after her speech. “It ought to be everybody – heterosexual, homosexual. When you go down and register to get married, that’s when the legal transfer of everything occurs and that’s a legal recognition of a relationship – and if you want to get married in a church, a temple, whatever, and you find one, great!” she said. “Civil marriage, everybody,” said Whitman. “I am not against marriage for gay couples. I just think it would make the issue easier if it was civil marriage for everybody.

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“I am not saying to Christian conservatives, ‘There is no place for you,’” said Whitman. “I am saying, ‘Please stop saying there is no place for us.’ “We can't succeed nationally as a party that only has 31 percent of the American people behind it,” she said. “It’s not going to work.

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I wonder how many death threats Whitman has receive so far from "loving" Christians because of her candid and legally correct remarks.

Christianists Holding Back GOP

Former GOP Governor of New Jersey and EPA head Christie Todd Whitman has an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post which echos thoughts that I have had for some time now: if the GOP wants to become a majority party again, it must jettison the control of the Christianist extremists who now control the party and who are increasingly radioactive in terms of driving away moderates and independents. The fixation of the Christianists with abortion, gay bashing, and trying to write religion into the laws is NOT something normal voters want. How the GOP will do this - since the Kool-Aid crowd, living in an alternate universe as they do, is oblivious to the fact that they are NOT mainstream. The fact that this faction of the party believes that McCain lost because he wasn't reactionary enough is indicative of the difficulty that will be encountered in prying control of the party away from the James Dobson and Tony Perkins crowd. Here are highlights from Whitman's column:

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Four years ago, in the week after the 2004 presidential election, we were working furiously to put the finishing touches on the book we co-authored, "It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America."

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Our central thesis was simple: The Republican Party had been taken hostage by "social fundamentalists," the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. Unless the GOP freed itself from their grip, we argued, it would so alienate itself from the broad center of the American electorate that it would become increasingly marginalized and find itself out of power.

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At the time, this idea was roundly attacked by many who were convinced that holding on to the "base" at all costs was the way to go. . . . What a difference four years makes -- and the data show it. While a host of issues were at play in this election, the primary reason John McCain lost was the substantial erosion of support from self-identified moderates compared with four years ago.

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Nor did the Republican ticket lose because "values voters" stayed home. On the contrary, according to exit polls, such voters made up a larger proportion of the electorate this year than in 2004 -- 26 percent, up from 23 percent. Extrapolating from those data, McCain actually won more votes from self-identified white evangelical/born-again voters than Bush did four years ago -- 1.8 million more. But that was not enough to offset the loss of so many moderates.

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Unless the Republican Party ends its self-imposed captivity to social fundamentalists, it will spend a long time in the political wilderness. On Nov. 4, the American people very clearly rejected the politics of demonization and division. It's long past time for the GOP to do the same.