Or maybe this just isn't scary enough to be good Republican fodder anymore, period.
Premise: Republicans are secretly hoping for an all-out Supreme Court loss on Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act so that they don't have to deal with
propping up this miserable electoral nightmare anymore:
In a mostly hidden subtext of the gay marriage debate, a lot of Republicans would be thrilled with the most far-reaching court decision possible. This is the only way, they reckon, to take the issue out of an electoral arena in which it is increasingly bringing them little but grief.
That would be a crushing defeat for voters and politicians, predominantly on the right, who believe marriage is exclusively between one man and one woman. But to Republican consultants, fearful of ending up on the wrong side of political history, such a ruling would be a liberation.
Hmm. Tough call. There's more than a little lipstick-on-a-pig going on there, with a Republican consultant muttering how that would really stick it to the Democrats, who would now have to move on to other issues like explaining to gay business owners "why Obamacare was crushing them," and so on, but I'll buy the notion that the party in general probably doesn't give a damn what the Supreme Court decides. If it turns out to be a crippling loss for marriage equality, they can toot their own horns, but if it turns out to be an unambiguous win for marriage equality, that'll be fodder for yet another massive fundraising drive asking the godbotherers and other cranks to dig just a little deeper to support the Godbothering Old Party and their promised future efforts to fight against such obvious tyrannies.
The point behind Republican embrace of social conservative efforts isn't because the party leaders have any particular dedication to social issues. The evangelical block is still there, of course, but the GOP has been mostly playing them for chumps since the 1980s and none of them have caught on yet—I don't think there's any real feeling among the party that the evangelicals are really going to jump ship now. No, the best of all solutions is the Fox News solution: for society to do things that sound absolutely terrifying to hard-core conservatives, because absolute terror is the only conservative emotion that results in getting them to the ballot box. There's no value in actually winning the social arguments, because then they're not fundraising or electoral tools anymore; the value is in playing the terror game. Panic over immigration would be the poster child of that particular branch of conservatism; anti-Muslim rhetoric another; gubbermint-is-coming-for-your-guns is the current winner, with the NRA making far more money off gun conspiracy theories in the wake of the Newtown murders than they ever could have with more mainstream, plausible or responsible rhetoric.
On balance, then, I think it's a plausible argument. Republican antipathy towards gay Americans is and always has been an election con, not a deep-seated value, and the party itself would be just as happy to see a loss as a win here. If marriage equality becomes a non-issue in America, as it very much seems it will, in the next decade, that means the party will have to go out and find a whole new group that's supposedly threatening the foundations of America. It's probably a bit too early to bring back "flag burners" as the terror o' the day, and efforts against immigrants are rapidly running afoul of corporate Republicans' need for a steady flow of those immigrants, so don't be too surprised if the next discovered great American menace turns out to be vegetarians or Amish people or people who don't own lawnmowers. There's not always a lot of fodder to work with.
Is it a deeply cynical, divisive and irresponsible strategy, on the part of the GOP? Of course it is, but it always has been.