Gay Marriage and Young Republicans

Meghan McCain's in the news again with her comments on gay marriage and the GOP. According to Ms. McCain, for "progressive" Republicans, the gay marriage issue is "about reaching a wider base and redefining what it means to be Republican, and leaving labels, stereotypes, and negativity by the wayside."

Read the whole thing, here. Ms. McCain argues that Ronald Reagan, in 1978, championed gay rights during a California initiative battle what would have prevented gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

The problem for Ms. McCain, and other advocates of same-sex marriage, is that Americans do not hold discriminatory views of homosexuals. Polls repeatedly find widespread support for the extension of equal protections to gay Americans. The problem is not the extension of rights to same-sex couples per se, but the redefinition of marriage itself. And huge majorities are opposed to changing the historical conception of society's normative tradition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Much of the meme on the left (alleging conservative bigotry) is in fact progressive totalitarianism and intolerance toward the traditional culture. That's why so many regular folks get turned off by the debate: They are hesitant to wade into the culture wars for fear of being attacked and browbeaten as homophobic when they are anything but.

Interestingly, Kristen Soltis, at The Next Right, finds some empirical support for Ms. McCain's argument on gay marriage and young Republicans. But a careful look at numbers offered by Soltis, drawn from the General Social Survey, reveals that youth voters are not all that sold on the acceptablility of homosexual relations, much less gay marriage:

I recently completed research on the topic of young voters and the GOP: where the Republican Party is losing young voters, how serious the threat is to the party, and how the Republican Party should respond. And on this point, Ms. McCain has it right - the issue of gay marriage is one on which young voters and the Republican Party diverge significantly ....

Yet issues relating to homosexuality find vast differences between the young and older voters. In terms of the issue of whether or not homosexual sex is wrong, 44.3% of respondents to the General Social Survey 18-34 believe it is "never wrong" compared to 33.5% of respondents overall. Furthermore, 47.3% of respondents 18-34 said homosexual sex was "always wrong" compared to 55.6% of respondents overall.

Eh, hello? "47.3% of respondents 18-34 said homosexual sex was "always wrong ..."

That statistic sticks out like a sore thumb. This is 2008 data. If nearly half of those 18-34 think that homosexual intercourse is always wrong, it's not a particularly robust statement on youth support for gay rights, much less same-sex marriage. Futher, for all the talk of society moving toward more acceptance of gay lifestyles, that's got to be a troublesome statistics for the radical homosexual activists. Indeed, numbers like these explain precisely why the gay nihilists browbeat tradtionalists into submission: Radical leftists know that their agenda violates the deepest sense of social propriety, and so they must portray traditionalists as bigots and religious "extremists" to make the sale for their own licentiousness.

I just checked Google for my post from January on the radical gay of the political left: "Gay Activists Plan Obama Inaugural Celebrations." At that entry I discussed the inaugural celebrations among gay activist groups, which included the deployment of "rimming stations" by those celebrating at the Doubletree Hotel in Washington. But note that a Google search for "rimming station gay" pulls up all kind of links to gay male sexual pornography. With all due respect to Meghan McCain, I seriously doubt these are the kind of "moderate conservative" views the GOP should be pushing. Or, at least, a look at young gay lifestyles reveals anything but a socially conservative outlook, and I'd wager Ronald Reagan would roll over in the grave at the thought of it.

Besides, as gay conservative Charles Winecoff argued recently, the gay rights agenda is really not about "inclusion" or "full acceptance." It's about social revolution:

Eight years after 9/11, the LGBT community gets its activism fix by indulging in nostalgic, anti-establishment indignation over petty domestic slights. Ganging up on an annoying little old lady carrying a cross at a Prop 8 rally satisfies the itch between workouts and White Parties. But wouldn’t it be genuinely awe inspiring to see masses of musclebound gay men taking on, say, a congregation of homophobic Islamic “thinkers” (who, BTW, love the idea of pushing gay men off cliffs to their death)? ....

Civil unions already offer gay couples the same basic legal status as married couples in several states, including California (and they’re a lot easier to get). But as a result of the gay community’s mass hissy fit to usurp marriage, the religious right has been re-ignited in its holy war against legal recognition of any gay relationships at all ....

40 years after the Stonewall Riots, it’s time for the LGBT community to reconnect with what made us rebel in the first place: the right to live not as conformist dhimmis, but as social, intellectual, and artistic pioneers. Instead of stirring up resentment trying to snatch a piece of a stale pie we don’t really need - and setting back our cause in the process - we need to keep moving forward, not “separate but equal,” but different and equal.

There's a lot to think about for the GOP in acceding to the demands of "progressive" Republicans for a wholesale cultural change that is nowhere near supported by a majority of Americans. Not only that, the youth demographic is open to political persuasion toward more conservative ideals on lifestyle and families.

There's been some talk lately of the formation of third political party, which would in effect be a splinter movement breaking away from today's GOP. So far that chatter's been associated with the Tea Party protests springing up around the country, but if the national Republican Party capitulates to the Megan McCain's and David Frums, it's not unlikely that the push for a new conservative party outside of the traditional two-party system would pick up even more steam.

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Related: Gay Patriot looks at the same data from Next Right, and then adds:

I don’t think the GOP need be pro-gay marriage to win the youth vote. I do think it needs [to] offer a vision of choice and opportunity to contrast the Democrats’ preference for government solutions and one-size-fits-all approaches.

That said, I think the best path for the party would be take a more neutral stand on gay marriage and favor a state-by-state approach, consistent with the federalist principles which once undergirded the GOP.

It's interesting that had Iowa taken the "federalist" route this last week, we would not have seen the approval of same-sex marriage in that state.