Dick Cheney showed support for gay rights and same sex marriage long before his daughter Mary wed.
Mary Cheney and Heather Poe weren’t married until 2012, on the 20th anniversary of their first date. Of course we can’t know how early Mary and Heather might have gotten married if same sex marriage was legal earlier.
Yes, but this was also after his daughter had come out. She wasn’t vocal about it but it was no secret.
I guess the unanswered question is whether Cheney became more liberal on the question after Mary came out and there’s no way to know that, I don’t think he’s said. I don’t think Cheney was much of a social conservative in the sense we now think of it; I don’t think he cared about abortion much, for example.
Harry Blackmun was appointed to the Supreme Court as a conservative, and early in his time he voted mostly with the other conservatives in the court. In the mid-70s, he slowly switched to supporting the more liberal wing of the court. It started with his support of (and writing the opion for) Roe v. Wade and continued for the rest of his term. When he retired, he was looked upon at the court’s most liberal justice (partly because the more liberal ones were gone).
David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren comes to mind:
He was appointed by Eisenhower who though he was a conservative. But (from above)
Libertarians are not anti-government. Few people think the government should have unlimited authority-- libertarians just have a smaller subset of things they believe are the legitimate function of a government. Would you call Nancy Pelosi anti-government because she doesn’t think the government should have the authority to stop free speech?
Goldwater was never much of a social conservative (he really was a very classic libertarian) and he hated the religious right. There used to be a lot of likeminded people in the GOP establishment, before it got taken over by radical nihilists.
Arianna Huffington was quite conservative. She was often paired as the conservative voice against a liberal on many talk shows.
She was married to Michael Huffington who ran for the Senate as a conservative Republican. He spent a large amount of his personal fortune and lost.
Then he came out of the closet, Arianna dumped him, and she turned to the left. Supported Kerry in 2004, etc.
One can be a social conservative without being part of the “Religious Right”. Goldwater’s position on issues considered to be in the realm of “social” (as compared to “economic”) changed over the years more towards the liberal end of the spectrum. Seems like exactly what the OP is asking about.
It’s certainly the case that if you model the political world on a simple left <—> right or conservative <----> liberal* axis, someone who is libertarian doesn’t fit well into that model, but that’s a different matter.
*in the contemporary, American sense of the term
Nitpick - it’s “Chief Justice of the United States.”