Beyond that, all the current conservative members of the court are already on record as opposing same-sex marriage.
The traditional meaning of the word marriage also implied that the wife was the property of the husband and all sorts of ideas that we have since abandoned. If you’re going to be consistent about calling it (for example), “gay divorce”, it ought to be “gay no-fault divorce”.
Correct. Except American Samoa, whose appeals are heard depending on which trial court had jurisdiction originally (apparently this is a bit of a haphazard thing with many being heard in the DC district court.)
The Idaho god squad raised sufficient hell to get a temporary stay, but probably even they know it’s just a nuisance move at this point. It is unlikely to stand. Meanwhile one couple in the whole benighted state got in under the wire by being first in line at the courthouse… their license was issued before the stay was announced.
More specifically, the GOP embrace of bigots is a Nixon legacy.
Remember Lincoln was GOP - so the South was solid Democrat, even after Hubert Humpfrey’s (look him up) famous Civil Rights speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, causing the infamous mass walk-out by the so-called “Dixie-Crats”.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act (signed by a Son of the south, LBJ) cemented it.
It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” (1968) which married the GOP and the Antioch Baptist Church and its ilk.
That turned the old CSA from solid Blue to solid Red.
If the GOP abandons the bigots, they go back to losing the White House every time.
Well, maybe the bigots can be foisted off on loony impotent third parties, leaving the Democrats and Republicans to appeal to the remaining majority - reasonably educated urban types. So let’s say 15% of the American voting population is serious hardcore stupid and would vote for the American Nazi Party if only the lamestream media weren’t out to make that seem bad or something, and the remaining 85% can be reasoned with. Can Republicans get 43% out of that 85%?
Even if you don’t agree they’re already there: Keeping that demographic voting for you only takes a superficial reason, and those are pitifully easy to dream up. If the “God, guns, and gays” platform is now missing the *gays *part, so what, they can easily replace it with *Mexicans *by drumming up immigration fears. You may have noticed that happening at about the same rate as gay-bashing has subsided. The beauty of it is that nativism is always effective and hard to combat.
It’s not an accomplishment, or even respectable, for a hack pol or a hack party to turn worry into fear, fear into anger, and anger into votes. All it takes is to have a substantial part of the population feeling a little worried about things.
So the sane remnant would obviously need to shift their platform a bit, to capture more of the middle from the Democrats. Something along those lines is almost sure to happen eventually; it’s just a question of when.
Not sure about this. There a LOT of places where you could run as a true “fiscal conservative, social liberal” and be competitive (if not out-right win). As long as social liberal didn’t involve guns, you could build a base out of that.
