To see just how far we've come on the issue of marriage equality, even serial adulterer and diehard social conservative Newt Gingrich is coming to acknowledge the inevitability of same-sex marriage.
Though he, himself, remains of the opinion that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, Gingrich believes the Republican Party should
accept a distinction between a "marriage in a church from a legal document issued by the state" -- the latter being acceptable.
And while he concedes that it will be difficult for many religious conservatives to make that leap, he believes that recent electoral successes legalizing gay marriage in several states point out the direction in which the nation is now headed. He also acknowledges the fact that so many families discovering that they have gay members in their midst is adding to the growing acceptance of marriage equality among the general populace.
It is in every family. It is in every community. The momentum is clearly now in the direction in finding some way to ... accommodate and deal with reality. And the reality is going to be that in a number of American states -- and it will be more after 2014 -- gay relationships will be legal, period.
He admits that this has been the case in his own life as well.
Stepping back from the political, Gingrich noted that he has a personal stake in the gay marriage debate. His half-sister works at the Human Rights Campaign. He has gay friends who've gotten married in Iowa. The man who once compared same-sex marriage to paganism is now worried that the Republican Party could find itself trapped in a bygone era on the matter.
He ends with this:
I didn't think that was inevitable 10 or 15 years ago, when we passed the Defense of Marriage Act...It didn't seem at the time to be anything like as big a wave of change as we are now seeing.
One Grinch down. How many left to go?