There have been a number of diaries here at dKos advocating the Democratic Party to become much more hard-line on gay issues. I think that this would be a major error.
The Republican Party has become very strong over the last 40 years selling a position to people. They get people to vote for the moral issues, and then, once in power, they slip the cards off the bottom of the deck.
That is, they did not gain power by saying "We are going to shift all the taxes paid by corporations to individuals, and we are going to cut support to state universities by cutting the Federal tax rate and we are going to support the Purina cat food stock by getting most old people to purchase more cat food for their own dinner" and so forth and so on. Rather, they found a very popular position: cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes. By getting people to endorse this insane idea (not locally insane, just globally insane), they got them to vote Republican. Thus, they have swindled the voters into supporting positions which they never would have supported at first examination.
That is, they found an issue that attracted voters. Once they got people to identify with the republican party by selecting a popular issue, they could then enact, or try to enact, their anti-populist, upper-class economic measures which are their actual agenda.
The gay activists want to reverse this. They want to use the components of the Democratic Party platform which a huge minority of Americans DO NOT SUPPORT as the leading issue for the party. This is, quite frankly, thoroughly nuts.
If we choose, as a party, to support the full agenda of the gay activists, we will lose the conservative Hispanics who now vote D for economics issues. We will lose conservative Blacks. We will not attract religious populists.
When we win by 55 % again, we can enact whatever we want. Until then, we must think strategically as well as morally. Compromise in politics is not a dirty word, it's the only word.
