New Survey: Huge Shifts on Gay Marriage; Bad News for the GOP and the Christofascists

With the federal court ruling striking down the Texas ban on gay marriage and Gov. Jan Brewer's veto of Arizona SB 1062 today was not a good day for American Christofascists and their pandering political whores in the Republican Party.  But in some ways these developments should cause less angst to the far right forces of hate and discrimination than the findings of a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute that underscore that the days of Christofascist political victories on social issues and the GOP's long term viability are nearing an end.  The findings also underscore that the Christofascists' anti-gay bigotry is a leading cause for the massive flight of the Milennial generation from organized religion - and the GOP.  Here are highlight from the survey's findings:

Support for same-sex marriage jumped 21 percentage points from 2003, when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, to 2013. Currently, a majority (53%) of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry, compared to 41% who oppose. In 2003, less than one-third (32%) of Americans supported allowing gay and lesbian people to legally marry, compared to nearly 6-in-10 (59%) who opposed.

„„Today, majorities of Americans in the Northeast (60%), West (58%), and Midwest (51%) favor allowing gay and lesbians to legally marry, while Southerners are evenly divided (48% favor, 48% oppose).

In 2003, all major religious groups opposed same-sex marriage, with the exception of the religiously unaffiliated. Today, there are major religious groups on both sides of the issue. Religiously unaffiliated Americans (73%), white mainline Protestants (62%), white Catholics (58%), and Hispanic Catholics (56%) all favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. A majority (83%) of Jewish Americans also favor legalizing same-sex marriage. Hispanic Protestants are divided; 46% favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry and 49% oppose. By contrast, nearly 7-in-10 (69%) white evangelical Protestants and nearly 6-in-10 (59%) black Protestants oppose same-sex marriage.

„„Today, nearly 7-in-10 (69%) Millennials (ages 18 to 33) favor same-sex marriage, compared to 37% of Americans who are part of the Silent Generation (ages 68 and  older). The generation gap today, or the difference in support for same-sex marriage between America’s youngest and oldest cohorts, is now 32 points, roughly as wide as it was in 2003.

Half (50%) of Millennial Republicans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, a view shared by only 18% of Republicans who are members of the Silent Generation.Nearly 6-in-10 (59%) black Millennials say gay and lesbian people should be allowed to legally marry, compared to only 39% of black Americans overall.

White evangelical Protestant Millennials are more than twice as likely to favor same- sex marriage as the oldest generation of white evangelical Protestants (43% vs. 19%).

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans report having a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian, nearly three times the number (22%) who reported having such a relationship in 1993. Americans who have a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian are 27 points more likely than those who do not to favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry (63% vs. 36%). This “family and friends” effect is present across all major demographic, religious and political groups.

Americans strongly support laws that would protect gay and lesbian people from discrimination in the workplace. More than 7-in-10 (72%) Americans favor laws protecting gay and lesbian people from job discrimination, compared to less than one-quarter (23%) who oppose.

Seven-in-ten (70%) Millennials believe that religious groups are alienating young adults by being too judgmental on gay and lesbian issues. 

Among Americans who left their childhood religion and are now religiously unaffiliated, about one-quarter say negative teachings about or treatment of gay and lesbian people was a somewhat important (14%) or very important (10%) factor in their decision to disaffiliate. Among Millennials who no longer identify with their childhood religion, nearly one-third say that negative teachings about, or treatment of, gay and lesbian people was either a somewhat important (17%) or very important (14%) factor in their disaffiliation from religion.

Roughly two-thirds (66%) of Americans agree bullying of gay and lesbian teenagers is a major problem in schools today, while nearly one-quarter (23%) disagrees. The belief that bullying of gay and lesbian youth is a major problem in schools is broadly shared across partisan and religious lines.

There is much more in the survey findings, but one thing is clear: the hate and bigotry of Christofascists and their GOP puppets is alienating more and more Americans and the day is coming when the elderly who comprise their principal base will have died off to an extent where the GOP can no longer win elections outside of ignorant backward regions of the country.   Stated another way, pandering to Christofascists and angry racist whites will be the death of the GOP.

Can the Democrats Retake the South?

While it is unlikely that anything significant can happen between now and the November 2014 midterm elections, just as the GOP is facing a bleak long term future in may parts of the country due to demographic changes and changing attitudes among the Milennials, change is happening in the South as well.  Even here in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia attitudes are changing be they in terms of gay couples joining heretofore straight only private clubs - my partner and I are examples - or service members openly marrying their same sex partners.  Moreover, in the last two year's statewide elections, Democrats prevailed.  A piece in Politico Magazine looks at why the Democrats may regain the South in the future.  Here are excerpts:

[I]t was one-party domination by Democrats, the party of resistance, of the anti-carpetbaggers. In fact, no other region of the country has ever been so completely dominated by one political party for so long—almost 100 years, so long that generations passed in which some Southern folks never even met a Republican. But all of that changed following the final implementation of Brown, the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Those momentous steps toward racial equality birthed the modern GOP in the South. This was the new resistance: The modern Republican Party in the South, once again, was built on race and the anti-Washington Democratic backlash brought about by civil rights.

This is where the road back to power starts for Southern Democrats. Populism and economic inequality will be the battleground of the 21st century, and while it’s true that in the South these issues are still inextricably tied to race, it’s a different conversation than the one our parents had. It is more honest and more open, both about race and about its economic and social implications for our society. We are the only party that can have that frank discussion. Racial equality leads to economic opportunity. We should own this issue, whether we are talking to African Americans, Hispanics or whites.

This is something the Republicans—trapped by their base and their history—simply cannot do. And it is the core not only of their utter lack of support within the black community but also of their problem with Hispanic voters, the South’s fastest-growing demographic. Of the 10 states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations from 2000 to 2011, all but two are in the South, with Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee topping the list, and Hispanics are more than twice as likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans.

To win over these new voters, Republicans must change their understanding of their own history. The past year has shown just how hard that is. All Democrats must do is embrace our history.

Thanks to John F. Kennedy, Andrew Young, Lyndon Johnson, Barbara Jordan and a host of others, we can do this. We can end the discussion of race as an issue that has divided us since our founding and talk about race as the economic issue it is, with real implications for the present and the future. This is not to say that every campaign must begin with a discussion of race. Far from it. But we must internalize it, embrace it and acknowledge that racial equality—really the equality of and opportunity for all men and women, is at the core what we believe—at the core of our economic message; it has been the very foundation of our party since 1965. I for one am proud of it, and we can now win on it.

Step two for Democrats deals with another taboo subject: money.

For three decades, Southern Democrats have basically run against or away from Washington. And when that does not work, we have run a “the other guy is way crazier than me” campaign to brand our opponents as out of the mainstream. The domination of media by national cable news, the rise of the Internet and the slow death of local news have made bashing Washington, D.C., obsolete or ineffective. But taking down the other guy, while a fun way to campaign, is not a long-term strategy for sustained victory. Sooner or later, our opponents will come to their senses.

The Millennial Generation: Our Liberal Future?

I've noted before that demographic changes spell long term doom for today's Republican Party and its Christofascist/Tea Party puppet masters.  Unfortunately, the needed death of today's virulent form of conservatism won't come soon enough to satisfy me even though the longer term out look is encouraging.  And leading the wave that will hopefully send the greed driven, white supremacist, homophobic GOP base into the political wilderness is the so-called "Millennial Generation."  A piece in New York Magazine follows up on an issue discussed in a previous post and looks at the hoped for future and the role the under 30 crowd will play in it.  Here are excerpts:

How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a generational one. The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. What’s more, younger voters supported President Obama during the last two election cycles for reasons that seem to go beyond the usual reasons — social issues like gay marriage and feminism, immigration policy, or Obama’s personal appeal — and suggest a deeper attachment to liberalism. The proclivities of younger voters may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.

More than four decades ago, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified the core of Americans’ political thinking as a blend of symbolic conservatism and operational liberalism. Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security. . . . . Public support for most of the particulars of government has stopped Republicans from rolling back the advances of the New Deal, but suspicion with “big government” has made Democratic attempts to advance the role of the state rare and politically painful.  

This tension continues to define the beliefs of American voters. . . .  But this is not the case with younger voters. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, voters under 30 say the government should do more to solve problems. More remarkably, 33 percent of voters under 30 identified themselves as liberal, as against 26 percent who called themselves conservative.

Obviously, such a future hinges on the generational patterns of the last two election cycles persisting. But, as another Pew survey showed, generational patterns to tend to be sticky. It’s not the case that voters start out liberal and move rightward. Americans form a voting pattern early in their life and tend to hold to it. That isn’t to say something couldn’t shake these voters loose from their attachment to the liberal worldview. Republicans fervently (and plausibly) hoped the Great Recession would be that thing . . . .

But young voters haven’t drawn this conclusion — or not many of them have, at any rate. So either something else is going to have to happen to disrupt the liberalism of the rising youth cohort, or else the Republican Party itself will have to change in ways far more dramatic than any of its leading lights seem prepared to contemplate.

As I have said before, the GOP seems bent on engaging in a form of slow political suicide.  The aging angry white vote motivated by racism, homophobia and a rejection of modernity is literally dying off and the GOP is doing nothing of substance to face the changing demographics overtaking the country.

Millennials Prepare to Destroy GOP

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republican Party in its current incarnation that is dominated by religious extremism, racism, greed and bigotry needs to be destroyed.  The GOP has simply become something incredibly ugly and it all traces, in my view, to the rise of the Christofascists within the Party.  This element despite it feigned piety is comprised of people who simply are not nice and decent.  Sadly, they see others as things rather than living, breathing human beings and display a callousness towards others that is reminiscent of the way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews of Europe.  Thankfully, a new study by the Pew Research group suggests that the Milennial generation may be poised to destroy today's GOP.   Here are highlights from the Daily Kos:

Millennials (those born roughly since 1980 or so, depending on your definition) are the most progressive generation since FDR.

That's the headline from this fascinating infographic from Pew, which examines the voting preferences of various generational cohorts over the last two decades.  We've heard this before of course.  Pew grouped voters into categories not based solely on birth year, but also on the year in which a voter turned 18 -- noting under what President this occurred (fascinating concept).  They then looked across the last 10 elections to see where deviations from the national average occurred.

Takeways --

1) The obvious lede -- every election Millennials have voted in, they've skewed Democratic. Almost as important?  Ditto for young Gen Xers (who turned 18 under Clinton) -- in every election except 2004 (when they skewed GOP) and 2000 (when they tracked with national averages), they skew Democratic as well.  

2) Millennials and young Gen Xers deviated from the norm in 11 of 12 opportunities.

3) . . . . the Clinton group (today age 30-37) skewed Democratic in 5 of 7 elections and skewed Republican in only one.  Powerful argument that this is the fault line: voters age 37 and younger, vs. those 38 and older.  Not Gen X vs. Millennial.  Everyone born after Star Wars came out is basically a Democrat.

4) The idea that young, idealistic, naive voters tend to side with progressives until they age into mature, worldly realists and start voting for conservatives seems to be (at least partially) debunked by this chart.  Only the Reagan/Bush Gen Xers exhibit anything like this behavior.  Other groups were either a) more consistent over time, or b) inconsistent but in unpredictable ways, not just "older = more conservative."

In short, this chart seems to confirm much of what we've been talking about for years -- Millennials seem to consistently prefer progressive ideals, and predictably vote for Democratic candidates that (theoretically) espouse those ideals.  This is not changing, and it's a bit of an historical aberration.

If you were a Republican strategist, this is just more heartburn.

Yet despite this demographic reality, the GOP continues to pander increasingly to an aging voter pool that is literally dying off.  And in the process, the GOP is alienating the younger generations that are repulsed by the GOP's racism, homophobia and rejection of modernity.  Long term, it is political suicide.  But then, of course, the Christofascists are utterly detached from reality, so perhaps this phenomenon should be no surprise.