The Republican National Committee's three-day (well, four-day, including the obligatory Reagan Day) "spring meeting" starts tomorrow, yet another in a long line of events focused on how to make Republicanism popular again in spite of all that
stuff that keeps happening. It will be in Hollywood, California, and have various meetings and workshops—think CPAC, but with more expensive hookers.
Anyway, one of the things they'll be deciding on is whether to adopt this proposed resolution once again condemning teh gays and their quest for equal rights:
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee affirms its support for marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and as the optimum environment in which to raise healthy children for the future of America; and be it further
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee implores the U. S. Supreme Court to uphold the sanctity of marriage in its rulings on California’s Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act.
The
actual text of the resolution, as obtained by Yahoo News, also includes a lot of footnotes meant to prove their case. Primarily, they prove that nobody in the entire Republican Party knows how to use footnotes, as they link to an assortment of
conservative op-ed columns and other detritus that would not pass muster as "sources" in a middle school book report. It doesn't really matter, however; the real goal of the resolution is to act as a meaningless but bitter something to appease the religious conservative base, a group that has been feeling
very put out by all this new Republican talk of "inclusiveness" and "respect" and "a little less bigotry, maybe?" and needs a little coddling right now.
This is one of those little things that shows how Republicans have managed to hold together that odd mix of hard-right religious zealots and hard-corporatist "libertarian" types for as long as they have. Simply promise greater respect and tolerance in one venue, and then go pass a resolution promising the opposite in the next. It doesn't even matter which approach is the true one and which one is for the patsies—it's all the same crap, in the end. If the richest 500 people in the country don't see a tax advantage from it, it's negotiable.
I do wonder, though … what would happen if a top Republican donor—and I mean a really top one, like Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers—publicly announced that they were gay and wanted to marry someone of the same sex? Now that would be a hoot to watch; I'd reckon you would see the official Republican Party position turn in two days flat. As we've learned from Henry the 8th on down, after all, the only difference between a sin and a sacrament is whether a sufficiently powerful man wants to do it.