It took some time for President Obama’s views on marriage equality to evolve. Now Newt Gingrich, champion of the Defense of Marriage Act himself, has done a political triple Salchow and publicly come out in favor of same-sex marriage. Or at least that he’s accepted its inevitability.
After puffing that he “probably would have done better against Obama” than Romney, Gingrich told the Huffington Post that “the momentum is clearly now in the direction in finding some way to accommodate and deal with reality. And the reality is going to be that in a number of American states — and it will be more after 2014 — gay relationships will be legal, period.”
Who cares?
On December 8, Maureen Dowd wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece that the world is coming to an end in 2012 — at least as “the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys” is concerned.
She failed to mention “heterosexual” in that laundry list of adjectives.
Gingrich is correct. The momentum is clearly moving in the direction of marriage equality in the United States. Four key wins in November spelled four crushing defeats for the party that for the last few decades has been doing everything it can to halt progress, and not even Karl Rove with his special math can ignore the proverbial handwriting on the wall.
So the question is — who cares?
Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin
That phrase, “writing on the wall,” is particularly appropriate. It comes from the Hebrew book of Daniel, in a scene where the Babylonian King Belshazzar is having a drunken party with the holy golden and silver vessels taken from the Jewish temple. In the midst of the orgy, a disembodied hand appears and writes the above words on the palace wall. Daniel interprets their meaning for Belshazzar:
And this is the writing that was inscribed: mina, mina, shekel, half-mina. This is the interpretation of the matter: mina, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; shekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; half-mina, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
– Daniel 5:25-28
Dowd wrote in her article: “Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone else could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in an obtuse and outmoded way that spelled doom.” So it’s hard not to see this move as a last gasp from the political party that brought us Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin, Sarah Palin and Richard Mourrdok — to name just a few.
End of an era
Things have not been going well for the Republican Party since we started realizing that maybe electing George W. Bush for a second term was the equivalent of having your ex-boyfriend’s name tattooed in large letters on your arm. Sure, there was the upset in the 2010 election that gave them the 193/242 majority in the House of Representatives, but one mishap and misstatement after another has induced enough eye-rolling to bring on a bout of vertigo. Between comments about “legitimate rape,” obstinate G.O.P. lockstep opposition to marriage equality, healthcare reform and immigration, and refusing to budge on taxes, it’s incredible that the American people didn’t oust them all out of office this year.
Traditionally, the Republican Party has had the solid support of conservative, evangelical (Caucasian) Christians. And if we look at the numbers from the Pew Forum from this election, it appears that held true again. Fifty-seven percent of Protestants voted for Romney, as supposed to forty-two percent who voted for Obama. The Catholic vote was close (50/48), but it was the non-Christians who voted overwhelmingly Democratic this year. It’s the religiously unaffiliated “nones” (which includes atheists and agnostics) who are the fastest growing “religious” group in the United States.
So what does this mean? It means that the support base the Republican Party has relied upon for decades to get their candidates elected is eroding — and quickly.
Evolve… or die
As Bob Dylan crooned in 1964, “the times, they are a-changin’.” The voting demographic is getting progressively younger as more conservative Baby Boomers age, retire and start to die off. This generation doesn’t have the same moral qualms about marriage equality that their elders do. And Republicans know that. As R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, was quoted in the New York Times last month:
Republicans in Congress “will tell me behind closed doors that this is the direction we need to go as a party . . . but publicly they’re not doing that.”
So what are we to make of Newt’s evolution on marriage equality? Is it anything more than a desperate attempt to seem less out of touch with reality? And will we gradually see more Republicans “evolve” on this issue between now and 2014 to avoid being seen as arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys? Maybe, but probably not in droves. The sway of the conservative Evangelical lobby still holds strong in the G.O.P.
As gay atheists, we need to flex our powers of critical thinking now more than ever. There may be a few Republican politicians who don’t agree with their party’s stance on marriage equality who will be emboldened to speak up in support of LGBT Americans. However, we only have to look at public statements and voting records to see if the move is a genuine one. These are crocodile tears shed by a species facing its now-inevitable demise due to its failure to truly evolve.
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