Conservative

Jackson: Republican Party must compromise on LGBT issues to gain voters

On Thursday, James Richardson, a former Republican spokesman for former Governor of Utah, John Huntsman, came out as a gay man.  He encouraged change within the Republican party to be in favor of same-sex marriage, so the GOP could stop losing votes on something so basic and focus on other issues.

Richardson’s column supports what a lot of younger Republicans are saying: that as a whole, Republicans need to stop being seen as the party of “No” and the party of keeping things away from people. The GOP needs someone to step up and make being in-favor of same-sex marriage the party line.

He made the announcement in an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he said “My partner and I are envious subscribers to the conventional, conservative family model; yet together, as two men wishing to grow grey and ornery in matching rocking chairs, we are consigned to ‘cohabitation’ as a consequence of law. That’s unjust, and it’s uniquely painful.”

There hasn’t been a GOP politician run for presidential office that has openly said he or she support same-sex marriage.

Rand Paul flip flops, Rick Perry recently compared being gay to alcoholism, Rick Santorum gay-bashes in almost every one of his speeches on marriage and Paul Ryan is against same-sex marriage, as is Marco Rubio. The only contender who openly supports same-sex marriage is Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, whose campaign has been somewhat small and lacking in media attention.



On Sept. 3, the Louisiana District Court judge, Martin Feldman, after referring to being gay as a “lifestyle choice,” chose to uphold Louisiana’s ban on same-sex marriage. This ruling isn’t good for our image, despite numerous President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush appointed judges destroying the barriers for marriage equality. People will remember the one obvious homophobe who maintains these barriers. Despite the GOP’s shift forward in some aspects, we’re still late to the party.

Our party is losing free votes by trying to appeal to an increasingly irrelevant section of the American voting populace, the Religious Right. A group of Americans who, according dictionary.com, are defined as,  “A coalition of right-wing Protestant fundamentalist leaders who have become increasingly active in politics since the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Roe vs. Wade. ”

Saying the Religious Right is dead is a bit of an overstatement as many of their positions on a variety of issues — same-sex marriage, religion in schools, abortion — are still a force in local politics where barriers for entry tend to be lower. But, on a national scale, the voting bloc is increasingly seeing itself isolated from the rest of the U.S. and is even aware of how much influence it has lost.

In a 2011 poll of evangelical leaders, Pew Research found that “U.S. evangelical leaders are especially downbeat about the prospects for evangelical Christianity in their society; 82 percent say evangelicals are losing influence in the United States today.” This puts the GOP in danger of losing millennial votes, as the Generation Y is much more secular than previous generations, according to a 2012 Pew research poll.

There is no rational reason for this party to be against same-sex marriage. The only people who want us to be against it are slowly but surely dying off and  being replaced by much more modern and secular Republicans who simply want equality for all. Our party needs an official policy or statement on this, so that we can draw people in and show them what else we are about: small government, economic freedom and civil liberties.

In the words of Jeb Bush at CPAC this year: “way too many people believe Republicans are … anti-everything, including anti-gay.”

Let’s fix that image.

Rami Jackson is a junior entrepreneurship and policy studies major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter  @IsRamicJ.





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