Riiiight.
Oh wait,
you're serious.
He could be hailed as farsighted, a serious leader who opened his party's doors for all people and generations. Rob Portman could be the Republican Party's first post-gay-marriage presidential candidate. [...]
Yet several forces, political as well as demographic, may converge to render a presidential candidacy by Portman, the Ohio Republican U.S. senator, as at least nominally viable. Key to this is the fact that a Portman candidacy could align with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that would end the legal and constitutional fight over same-sex marriage. Such a ruling could come by next summer, well before the Republican voters go to the first 2016 caucuses and primaries.
The "yet" part refers to the obvious problem where Portman (whose stance on the issue changed when he learned that one of his sons was gay, thus proving him to be at least a better person than certain Cheneys) would have to make it through a primary campaign season characterized by the base dousing gasoline on and setting a match to anyone who professes to have the barest amount of tolerance for anything that is not rabid social conservativism. Setting that rather big "yet" aside, however, let's suppose for a moment that the Supreme Court issued a ruling that ostensibly "ended" the legal fight over same-sex marriage. Do we really think that would "end" conservative fury over the issue? Like the Court "ended" the legal fight over both abortion and contraceptive use decades ago, thus leading to a quarter-century of conservative voices shutting up about both those things? Mm-hmm.
You could make an equally strong case in the other direction—stronger, perhaps. A Court ruling declaring same-sex marriage to be constitutional and protected would send the far-right into frothing fits, and vowing to something-something in order to overturn that ruling would become the new must-have litmus test. You'd have conservative groups demanding candidates sign pledges against it (they already do), you'd have firebrand preachers condemning the wickedness of any politician that didn't see their way (as per usual, after all) ... the Supreme Court could announce that they were all gay-marriaging each other and it would do precisely nothing to quell conservative fervor against it. If the Court doesn't rule their way, it just mean that the Court has been captured by radical leftists, and the new pledge will be to put real conservatives on the Court, not lily-livered liberals like Antonin Scalia and that communist Roberts fellow.
David Lampo, director of publications at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said a Supreme Court decision striking down prohibitions on gay marriage "would be a godsend" to someone like Portman.
"It kind of takes it off the table, at least as far as a presidential issue, because the marriage issue, which was certainly the most contentious of all gay issues, will be settled," said Lampo, author of the book "A Fundamental Freedom: Why Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians Should Support Gay Rights." He is a board member of Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP group supporting gay rights.
That is a lovely bit of optimism which, if any shred of modern political history is to be our guide is a pipe dream born of a unicorn's gentle burp. The
Log Cabin Republicans were the group that had to take it as a small token of victory when their members were, after a mighty public battle, allowed to
merely attend the year's big conservative convention.
Yes, the American population is increasingly for marriage equality. That's a fact. And young Americans, and "independent" Americans, and moderate Americans, and so on and so forth. But the Republican Party is conspicuously not any of those things, so it doesn't matter.
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