Queering the GOP

What Bush’s moves represent is the institutionalization within the Republican Party of the most radical aspect of the Sexual Revolution. I don’t think many GOP grassroots activists, especially in the churches, understand this. They will. This was inevitable, and now, it’s here. No Republican president will ever campaign on a promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn same-sex marriage. Given that it is very difficult to imagine SCOTUS revisiting abortion in our lifetime, or ruling differently on it than it did in Casey, it seems to me that socially conservative voters have to ask ourselves what, exactly, does the Republican Party offer us? I think the GOP would be much more sensitive to religious liberty concerns than the Democrats, but that is pretty thin stuff. It might be enough to justify voting Republican, but if other issues are front and center — war and peace, or economic concerns — there will be much less cause for a social conservative to vote Republican for socially conservative reasons. 

“Vote Republican: They May Be Politely Indifferent to Us, But At Least They Don’t Hate Us” is hardly a rallying cry. That logic may make the most sense, from a strictly pragmatic point of view, but most people do not vote strategically. Social conservatives, I think, are now in a worse position vis-à-vis the GOP than labor unions were to the Democrats in the Clinton era. Republican presidential candidates will still feel obliged to respect us publicly, but they will not advance our interests. The difference is, labor unions still had money to donate. There aren’t many social conservatives in the GOP donor class.