Majority of Americans Age 65+ Support Gay Marriage

Even as the Republican Party continues to court the dwindling number of Christofascists in the party base by way of a continual stream of anti-LGBT legislation, a new Gallup poll shows that for the first time a majority of Americans over age 65 support same sex marriage.  Not that this development will end the GOP's self-prostitution to the hate-filled and ignorance embracing "godly folks."  I remain stunned that the Republican Party refuses to expand its base either racially or in terms of its treatment of sexual minorities.   Sooner or later - hopefully, as soon as November 2016 - this misogyny will catch up with the GOP in a major way.  Gallup lays out the new poll findings which , in my view, ought to be a major wake up call to anti-gay Republicans.  Here are highlights:

Sixty-one percent of Americans say that marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by the law as valid, consistent with the 58% and 60% recorded in 2015. Last year's Supreme Court decision made same-sex marriage legal nationwide -- but the issue remains contentious at state and local levels, among religious groups and within the Republican Party.

With six months left until Election Day, the issue of gay marriage has been less prominent this year than in the past few presidential elections. The Supreme Court's ruling in 2015 makes the issue somewhat moot, and both Democratic candidates support it. Meanwhile, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has been fairly muted on the issue compared with some his GOP opponents, particularly those who backed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. While Trump says he opposes same-sex marriage, the issue does not appear on his campaign website. . . .

Four in 10 rank-and-file Republicans say same-sex marriage should be legally recognized. This is the highest support on record and is more than twice as high as the 16% found in 1996. The GOP remains the least supportive of gay marriage among the three main party groups, as strong majorities of independents (65%) and Democrats (79%) say such marriages should be recognized as valid under the law.

Support for gay marriage has consistently been highest among adults younger than 30 years, but support declines with each step up the age scale. At the same time, Americans in all four age groups have become more supportive since 1996.

This year marks the first time in Gallup's trend that the majority of adults aged 65 and older said gay marriage should be legal. Fifty-three percent of Americans aged 65 and older now support same-sex marriage. That is still well below the 83% support among 18- to 29-year-olds, the highest support among the age groups.

The percentage of Republicans saying gay marriage is a pivotal voting issue for them has fallen to 18% -- down from 27% as recently as last year. Among Democrats, the issue has become more important, climbing to 32% after registering 26% a year ago and just 10% in 2008.

Americans' heightened approval of gay marriage this year makes the issue a fairly straightforward one for the remaining Democratic presidential candidates. Not only do the vast majority of fellow Democrats agree with their stance, but they also have little to fear on the issue from the general electorate.

Despite their wailing and all the flying spittle, the Christofascists have lost this battle even as they fight a rear guard action against increasing LGBT acceptance by society.  I continue to believe that history will see the opponents of LGBT equality in a light similar to how segregationists are viewed by most of society - at least outside of GOP circles and the increasingly ugly GOP base.  

Daily Press: Gay Marriage Ruling Moves Virginia Toward the Right Side of History

The Neanderthals and"godly Christians" in the Daily Press' circulation area will have a cow over today's main editorial in that newspaper which "celebrates" the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling last week upholding Judge Arenda Wright Allen's February 13, 2014, decision that found Virginia's same sex marriage bans to violate the U.S. Constitution.  In the minds of these misogynists, religious freedom means that they get to force their toxic religious beliefs on all citizens.  That even the Daily Press - hardly the most liberal of newspapers - sees the ruling as moving Virginia toward the right side of history vindicates Attorney General Mark Herrings decision not to defend the animus inspired Marshall-Newman Amendment.  Here are editorial highlights:

The prospect of marriage equality makes many people uncomfortable. It makes some very angry. To stop it, opponents successfully amended the state constitution to define marriage exclusively as between one man and one woman, winning 57 percent of the vote in 2006.

But eight years later, the landscape has changed. . . . . preventing access to marriage, and the benefits it entails, is a losing cause. We celebrate this decision as a step forward for Virginia, one that moves the commonwealth away from discrimination and toward the right side of history.

The trend here is obvious. The United States is moving toward recognition of same-sex marriage. A great many court cases find judges reaching a common conclusion: Marriage is a fundamental right of American citizens and attempts to limit access to it amounts to a constitutional violation.

That was a key part of the Fourth Circuit's ruling, which upheld the decision made by U.S. District Court Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen earlier this year. She found the commonwealth's marriage amendment, which reflects the Biblical definition of a union between one man and one woman, in violation to the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

Judge Allen took the additional step of drawing a parallel between this case and the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia. That decision invalidated the commonwealth's anti-miscegenation laws, which banned interracial marriages.

It is coincidence that Virginia finds itself as a high-profile battleground once again in the national debate over marriage. But the nod to history was not lost on those writing for the Fourth Circuit majority, who made a point of calling Virginia's prohibition of same-sex marriage a "type of segregation."  We cannot disagree.

As we have said many times previously, gays and lesbians live and work in the commonwealth. They own homes, pay taxes and vote here. Like their heterosexual neighbors, they aspire to see their communities enjoy good schools, safe streets and a high quality of life.

The Fourth Circuit's ruling means Virginia is headed in that direction as well.  We celebrate these developments and look forward to the day, which now seems inevitable, when all our citizens are free to love and legally marry whom they choose.

It is no coincidence that many of those in Virginia either supported or are the direct descendants of those who supported slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws, "Massive Resistance" and bans on interracial marriage.  It also is no coincidence that in each and every one of these past horrors in Virginia was justified by selective quotes from the Bible and claimed "sincerely held religious belief."  The toxicity of religion and the Bible seems to never end.

The LBJ Renaissance

I will confess to the fact that I am of an age where I remember JFK's assassination and Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing in as Kennedy's succession and then his 1964 re-election.  I also remember his disastrous decision to escalate the fool's errand in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This fatal decision ultimately led to Johnson's decision not to seek re-election in 1968.  Johnson was not without his faults, but sadly his contributions to the advancement of civil rights is now often obscured by the Vietnam War disaster.  But for Johnson, the civil rights effort begun under John F. Kennedy might have died.   As The Daily Beast reports, a new appreciation of Johnson's civil right role - at least out of GOP/white supremacist circles - is re-emerging.  It is telling that the GOP claims that Democrats "buy votes" from blacks through handouts.  The reality is that many blacks still remember which political party forced through the Voting Rights Act - and Act that Republicans seek to gut and render useless.  Here are some excerpts:

History often casts its glow fickly. Sometimes we get a sense of how one will be reflected in its light contemporaneously. Sometimes it takes a little longer to sort things out.

In 1865, when an assassin’s bullet felled Abraham Lincoln, his loss was felt immediately and his place in the presidential pantheon all but assured. Though he had elicited withering criticism during the course of his four-year presidency, the sixteenth president had lived to see the Civil War to its bloody end, keeping the Union whole while putting a constitutional end to the odious institution of slavery. “It is small consolation that he died at a moment in the war when he could best be spared,” wrote Harper’s Weekly just after his death, “for no nation is ready for the loss of such a friend.”


It has taken history far longer to catch up to the legacy of our 36^th president, Lyndon Johnson.  
A hundred years after Lincoln’s passing, Johnson stood before Congress and delivered one of the great, unheralded speeches of its age, a plea before Congress to put the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Though slavery had long been abolished at Lincoln’s hand, racism, virulent and intractable, continued to plague much of America. A year earlier, Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first meaningful civil rights bill since Reconstruction, striking down Jim Crow laws that allowed for racial segregation throughout the South.

“[I]t is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice,” Johnson said as he looked over his former Congressional colleagues in the House chamber, many of them unyielding segregationists, as his mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed determinedly. “And we shall overcome.”

Through what became known legendarily as “the Johnson Treatment”—wielding political capital, horse-trading, threatening, cajoling, flattering, whatever it took—Johnson got his Voting Rights Act. He considered the law his greatest legislative accomplishment. That’s saying something given that he also saw through Medicare, Medicaid, the Immigration Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the Public Broadcasting Act, the Arts & Humanities Act and a spate of other landmark laws. 

It took Lyndon Johnson to finish what Abraham Lincoln had started.

Yet despite his titanic role in America’s quest for civil rights, the greatest domestic movement of the Twentieth Century, LBJ has been largely underappreciated—even ignored—until recently. While Lincoln won his war, vanquishing the Confederate Army, Johnson could never quite overcome the Communist insurgency in Vietnam. It was Ho Chi Minh who prevailed, not LBJ.

Now, forty-five later, Lyndon Johnson seems to finally be getting his due; history’s light is beginning to penetrate the shroud of Vietnam that has darkened his legacy. “I absolutely think the time has come,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin of reevaluating Johnson’s legacy in a front page New York Times story on Sunday. “When he left the office, the trial and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam.”

[I]n early April, the LBJ Presidential Library will host a Civil Rights Summit to mark the act’s fiftieth anniversary that will draw a host of luminaries including many aging heroes of Civil Rights movement and as many as four U.S. presidents. Moreover, LBJ is regularly upheld in the media as a president who got laws passed through Congress at a time when Washington sausage-making has all but ground to a halt.

Though Johnson died over four decades ago, succumbing to heart failure at his beloved LBJ Ranch in 1973 at the age of 64, we are only now starting to get the true measure of the man.