Republicans and Gay Marriage

No one can deny that the 2012 elections went badly for Republicans, they lost the presidency as well as seats in the House and Senate.  They were also on the wrong side of the gay marriage fight in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. Republicans have spent the last four months trying to find out where they went wrong and try to fix it so that they can go back to winning presidential elections again. Already we’ve seen them attempt to fix their problems with Latino voters by going after immigration reform, they’ve even considered going after the big banks. Yet there is one issue on which the Republican Party would appear to be unanimous; opposition to gay marriage. Whenever gay marriage is voted on in state legislatures, very few Republicans vote for the measure, and those who do often get ‘primaried’ by their own side.

The reality is, Republicans are divorced from the opinion of the majority of Americans. Polling consistently shows that, nationwide, Americans support gay marriage, but only by a few percentage points. It also varies hugely, in Massachusetts support for gay marriage stands at about 60%, whereas in Mississippi support barely makes double figures at 13%. Looking at the trend, you can clearly see that support for gay marriage is constantly rising and so this creates a problem for Republicans. They have to modernise their party, but their base is staunchly opposed to any attempts to try and bring the party into the 21^st century. In a surprise move, some Republicans have tried to move the party into a more progressive stance. At the end of last month over 100 prominent Republicans signed a letter to the Supreme Court urging it to strike down the Defence of Marriage Act, the law that forbids the federal government from recognising same-sex marriage. Yet there was one type of Republicans missing from the letter: incumbents. Basically all the Republicans that signed the letter (bar a few) are retired, no incumbent governor or senator signed on to the letter. The reason? Primaries. When Republicans show any sort of willingness to compromise, or support something that is not party policy, the base gets angry and chucks them out of office in favour of a more radically conservative Republican. Yet one incumbent Republican has decided to take a leap and announced his support for gay marriage. Rob Portman, the junior Senator from Ohio announced today that he supports legalising same-sex marriage. Portman is quite influential in the Republican Party, and at one stage was thought as a serious contender to be Mitt Romney’s running mate last year. Portman says he began to doubt his opposition to gay marriage when his son came out to him two years ago.

Now that such an influential, incumbent, Republican has announced his support, will other Republicans join him? Perhaps moderate Republicans such as Susan Collins will change their minds and support gay marriage! If some Republicans do decide to support same-sex marriage, then perhaps the wave of legalisations that many of us predict will happen in the coming months and years. We can only wait and hope.