And so, if only by remorseless process of elimination, at long last the big A wins the pool. I had Nelson and Ayotte as next to flip in the last SSM thread; there are only something like six Democrats in the Senate who haven’t switched yet, so I was bound to be right soon. Kudos to this guy for sparing me the humiliation of missing every call until we were down to one lone Democrat left.

In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times editorial board, he wrote:

It is generally accepted in American law and U.S. society today “… that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I believe that. The civil rights and responsibilities for one must pertain to all.

Thus, to discriminate against one class and not another is wrong for me.

If we are endowed by our Creator with rights, then why shouldn’t those be attainable by Gays and Lesbians?

Simply put, if The Lord made homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, why should I discriminate against their civil marriage? I shouldn’t, and I won’t.

So I will add my name to the petition of senators asking the Supreme Court to declare the law that prohibits gay marriage unconstitutional.

He’s 70 years old, yet apparently only recently did the insight occur to him that both the Declaration of Independence and God point the way towards gay marriage. I’ve gotten used to people on my side of this issue treating it as a no-brainer even though many of them held the opposite view not long ago, but I think Nellie might have just raised the bar on latecomer hubris. I guess if you’re going to drag your feet, you need to make up for it somehow.

Any more flips coming soon? My hunch is that the pared-down core of Democratic holdouts won’t easily be moved in the near term. Your best bet in the pool might be someone from the GOP, frankly. I’ll stick with Kelly Ayotte. I wanted to pick Zombie Reagan but evidently … he’s already declared.