Republicans are looking worse and worse on same-sex marriage, as a new Quinnipiac poll points out.
American voters say 56 – 38 percent they would support a U.S. Supreme Court decision granting same-sex couples the constitutional right to marry, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today. Voters support 56 – 36 percent same-sex marriage in general.
Backing a possible Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage are Democrats 70 – 24 percent, independent voters 61 – 34 percent, men 55 – 41 percent and women 57 – 35 percent. Republicans are opposed 62 – 34 percent, the independent Quinnipiac University Poll finds.
Voters also oppose 53 – 40 percent allowing individual states to prohibit same-sex marriage, and support 57 – 36 percent requiring states to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. Democrats, independent voters, men and women back same-sex marriage in these questions, with Republicans opposed.
So again, the only group opposed to same-sex marriage is your average Republican, about 2 to 1 against. Having said that, the 38% that do not support a SCOTUS decision legalizing marriage equality nationally still have plenty of options in making things miserable for folks, the 40-year plus fight over Roe v. Wade proves there’s certainly an option to fight a SCOTUS decision declaring a constitutional right and attack it and weaken it state by state. It’s also possible that SCOTUS could decide that it’s up to the states to decide, in which case who knows where it’ll go.
How much of an appetite the GOP will have for fighting on this particular hill remains to be seen, but at least some of the 2016 Clown Car Crew are calling for open civil disobedience against such a SCOTUS ruling legalizing the practice, and I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better after a court decision.
It’s going to be massively embarrassing to the GOP when they resist, but at the same time there’s going to be the capability to do a lot of damage to some good people who just want to get married.
Bobby Thomson
Other than a few southern JPs refusing to perform civil marriages, I don’t see what form this civil disobedience would take.
Ray Ingles
Sometimes I worry about ‘easy (well, sort of) come, easy go’. General public opinion has changed rapidly; could it change back just as rapidly? I sure hope not.
When the skies don’t collapse, I’d expect things to settle down and in a decade or two the conservative Christians will all be saying ‘opposition to same-sex marriage was an extreme position and most of us didn’t oppose it’. Like the opposition to mixed marriages previously.
srv
It’s a good thing The Constitution is a popularity contest.
KG
@Ray Ingles: yeah, my guess is this will follow the basic path of interracial marriage. As far as I know, on e the Supremes handed down Loving there were no significant challenges to it because it’s not the kind of issue where you can put the genie back in he bottle easily. And consider interracial marriage didn’t get majority approval until the early 90s (which is somewhat shocking to me, but perhaps that was a function of the South and rarity).
scav
@Bobby Thomson: Whining, rudeness, synchronized foot-stomping and breath-holding, vandalizing inappropriate cards in the Hallmark aisle, something bakery or pizza-based, imagine them trying to picket each and every venue where a SSM is celebrated (wearing silly hats of some kind, they do seem to love their costumes) . . .
MattF
It’s really a remarkable difference between Republicans and everyone else. I wonder what the breakdown for FOX viewers vs. FOX non-viewers is.
boatboy_srq
@srv: Even better that the Constitution says precisely nothing about marriage, and has some fairly explicit words for people who use “faith” to discriminate because their religion forbids equal treatment to
nonbelieversnonconformistsblackswomenOther People™.jonas
@srv: Kent Brockman: “Now, here are some results from our phone-in poll: 95% of people believe Homer Simpson is guilty. Of course, this is just a television poll which is not legally binding. Unless proposition 304 passes, and we all pray it will.”
crash
Shouldn’t that be “Klown Kar Krew”?
Big ole hound
Within a couple of years it will become that 27% but maybe that will be cut to 25% by then as they die off.
Chris
@Ray Ingles:
It’ll be exactly like racial equality; they’ll stop arguing about legal bans on gay (whatever) and shift the focus to how pro-gay legislation is going too far and forcing those poor people with legitimate religious objections to go against their conscience by serving gay people.
boatboy_srq
Their new hill to die on now that
slave ownershipproperty rights has fallen out of favor. Between this and the “onlywhite male landownerscitizens can vote” push, the next cycle or three will be interesting.RaflW
I am hopeful that the court will just make it constitutional. Given the overall public sentiment, I think that decision would actually tamp down GOP assholery. Yes, some would continue to fulminate (and, more importantly, fundraise) on it. But give the decision about two House cycles, and it’ll be all but dead as an issue in general elections. Primaries? Who cares.
But for further screwing the GOP brand, I’d almost (but not quite – as real people in the several states would be negatively impacted) prefer SCOTUS saying it is a state’s right. That gets this losing loser issue out there for multiple cycles. I’d find that sort of delicious. But as I say, the human cost for LGBT couples in the reprobate states is too high.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Just like Brown v. Board of Education settled racial educational disparities for all time, and Roe v. Wade put the abortion question to rest permanently, so too will this decision become the law of the land, and in a few years no one will even remember it, they will simply have accepted it without any questions.
Shit, hope you self-deluded fuckers have the stomach for a long fight. What with Dems recent (last 40 years) history of strategic retreat from any steps forward for the common good, I am not hopeful.
JustRuss
Zandar, your title is going to give poor George Will a sad. In his latest screed, he harumphs about how liberals who use the phrase “wrong side of history” must believe that “History” (with a capital H) is this inexorable force bending the world to its will. Apparently the possibility that humans might observe trends, data, and statistics, and accurately predict how they’ll play out is beyond his ken.
Or he may be a dishonest hack.
Jay C
@Bobby Thomson:
How about Republican-dominated State Legislatures in the hinterland going full-metal wingnut, and pushing through all sorts of “religious liberty” legislation designed to put every possible roadblock (even if only symbolic) in the way of normalizing same-sex marriages (“legalizing” is another issue). And providing official/legal cover for all those County Clerks and JPs who get the icks at the thought of same-gender couples…
Of course, given whatever parameters the SC might set down, these measures might ultimately prove unconstitutional/illegal, but by the time any such ruling might come down, the gay-bashers will have had a couple of years (?) to soak their
marksbase for contributions to fight the Great Gay Menace.Lee
This is a national ‘Please proceed governor”.
DOOOOOOO IIIIIIITTTTTTTTT!!!1!!!eleventy!!
Make it a major platform of your campaign to stand against marriage.
Valdivia
That SC decision about FaceBook looks pretty bad to me, but maybe someone in the know can enlighten me.
Ella in New Mexico
@MattF:
Most of that is age, then geographic location, then personal experience.
My husband’s brother and his wife are in their mid- 50’s and have voted Republican forever, but have quite a few “liberal” beliefs, so they often reassure us they’re “indpendent”. They live in a conservative part of southern Pennsylvania, attend church regularly (United Church of Christ after leaving the Lutheran Church) and pretty much detest Obama and Pelosi and all the Democrats. But one of his two daughters is not only gay, she’s transgendered. The family has loved and mostly accepted her “difference” since she was a little kid firmly asserting “I’m not a girl, I’m a boy!”. She and her long-time girlfriend live in the basement apartment of his home. Her sister still lives there too. They are close and as supportive of one another as siblings could be.
Meanwhile, my husband’s Aunts and Uncles and several other extended family members in their 60’s and up not only regularly dispense anti-gay hatred, they’ve done it to him and to my husband’s parents (who are almost 80, also Republicans but came out of the Eisenhower Republican era and have never had an issue with gays, abortion, civil rights, etc.)
Old, white, isolated into conservative areas, and belonging to religions that preach gays are abominations generally defines about 70% of the Republican Party, as is reflected in these polls. The rest are waiting for them to die or publicly call themselves independents out of shame.
Patricia Kayden
@Bobby Thomson: Agree. There really is no way to walk back a pro-same sex marriage SCOTUS decision. The most I expect is a lot of angry Christianists pontificating about gay rights being a sign of impending doom and the world’s end. If Republicans are smart, they’ll drop this issue and keep it moving.
cokane
remember the GOP crowd that booed a military guy just for being gay in 2012? I doubt the R primary electorate has shifted much in four years. You’ll probably see all the candidates go pretty hard anti-gay rhetoric. Then the nominee will soft pedal it in the general and few in the national media will even bother to call out this bullshit — just like how Romney “won” the first debate by lying about everything he ever said in the primary races.
Benw
@Jay C: first the Supreme Court needs to legalize gay marriage. Even that would be an amazing step forward compared to even 10 years ago! Then the red states can try to pass anti-gay “religious liberty” bills as you say, but so far the failure of those bills in Indiana, Georgia and LA is a pretty encouraging sign. As CONGRATULATIONS says above, we will still have to fight it out, but we will be fighting for something gained if the Supremes come through.
satby
@Ella in New Mexico: See, I don’t get how someone can accept and support their gay child and then support and vote for the party that is dedicated to making that child’s life worse.
OzarkHillbilly
I look forward to one of these idiots filing to have a case heard before the Supreme Court.
Tommy
It is amazing how fast things have changed. I like to think the majority of our public as come out against hate and the dislike of people that might be somewhat different then them. Heck my father who is nothing close to a liberal is pro-same sex marriage now. Time have changed and the GOP needs to realize it or lose elections they might be able to win.
Gene108
Would be interesting to see support by state. 30 million Californians will overwhelm the bigotry of folks in Utah, Kansas, Wyoming, etc.
GregB
The party of Duggar-Hastert-Gingrich family values will not stand for this.
Villago Delenda Est
@JustRuss: I’ll go with option two, thank you.
fuckwit
@JustRuss: Well history indiscriminately stomps on lefty causes too. Income inequality, corpotatism/neoliberalism/race-to-the-bottom, environmental destruction, jobs replaced by technology, overpopulation, these are all the inexorable force of history as well. It’s some consolation that things like racism and sexism and religion are gradually heading into the dustbin too. But to say history has a liberal bias is a bit strong. It’s a sword that can cut any way possible.
Paul in KY
@Jay C: Wouldn’t surprise me if they tried that. Especially if they thought it would help them get re-elected.
Paul in KY
@Ella in New Mexico: Shouldn’t that person you refer to in your post be called ‘he’?
Paul in KY
@Tommy: I’m telling you, Tommy, there’s a hook somewhere that will get him to start voting Democratic. You & your mother need to put your heads together & figure out what it is.
shortstop
@Chris:
There’s a small but highly vocal minority already well into this activity. It’s hard for them on the one hand: they no longer get to discriminate all day long with legal impunity and social approbation. On the other hand, they get to wallow in that sweet, sweet perceived victimhood many Christians and most wingnuts love so dearly. I ought to be able to run a public accommodation without having to follow the applicable laws of my jurisdiction, because CHRISTIAN! Criticizing any of my opinions is INFRINGING ON MY FREE SPEECH!
Honestly, a not-insignificant number of them are earnestly arguing that “soon it will be illegal to be Christian.” I suspect they’re fapping away while making this statement.
This is why organizations like NOM, the World Congress of Families and so on will not be going anywhere after the ruling. They’re just shifting their efforts to bilking butthurt Christians of their cash under the guise of “religious freedom” initiatives. They’re also ramping up their support of gay-bashing activities in Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe and other parts of the world (while whining about pro-equality Americans “interfering” in the Irish referendum process).
Valdivia
Speaking of wrong/right side of history. Brava Caitlin Jenner!
Don K
@Bobby Thomson:
Well, I fully expect the AG of Michigan to rule that language in Michigan’s income tax law limiting joint tax filing to “husband and wife” remains in effect, that marriage officiants who aren’t clergy may refuse to officiate based on religious beliefs, and that county clerks may refuse to issue marriage licenses based on religious beliefs. Schuette is a true believer, and he’s going to need a stronger slapdown than he’ll get in June before he stops wasting taxpayer money on this shit. And don’t ask how he got elected. In his TV ads last year, he was just the nicest guy who was only interested in making sure cops’ widows got their pensions in the aftermath of Detroit’s bankruptcy. He won’t even pay a price when running for governor in 18 unless the Dems make an issue of it (which they won’t, because “There be rednecks!”).
Bobby Thomson
@Jay C: that’s not civil disobedience. That’s just enacting unconstitutional legislation.
Tommy
@Paul in KY: My brother and his wife and their only grandkid live a few miles away. I got a lot of house and mom and dad stay with me for a few days a month because they live across the state. Talked to him for hours. Just not sure what it is and I have spent more time thinking about it than I care to admit.
He is pro same sex marriage. He isn’t a racist. He isn’t remotely religious. He was against the war in Iraq. On topic after topic he isn’t Republican. It pains me and I don’t know what to do.
shortstop
@Tommy: Simple tribal identification, perhaps? It took years of my walking my mother through issue after issue, pointing out her liberal positions on same, before she could let go of “But Democrats are tax and spend and believe in big government” and embrace her inner lefty. She had always thought of herself as a Republican and it was just too hard to shift gears on that self-perception. When she finally did, she felt super-free and now is a big old canvasser for Dem candidates.
g
How do you perform civil disobedience about gay marriage?
Refuse to attend someone’s wedding?
boatboy_srq
@g: There’s probably a bunch on that side who think not immediately recognizing their mandatory divorces and continuing to live with their cisgendered spouses will suffice for that.
/snark (I think)
shortstop
@g: Refuse to sell them cakes, flowers, photography, etc. This is the argument they’re making — I’m defending neither its legality (depending on jurisdiction) nor its morality.
WereBear
I doubt it, because it was always a biased outlook anyway; there’s no reason for it, it was based on fear and ignorance.
Now that Harvey Milk is smiling down from heaven, saying “I told you so!” it’s no longer hidden. Gay people are your accountant, your neighbor, your cousin. That singer you like and that athlete on your team. It looks ridiculous to fear and hate them now.
It turns out, you know them.
Tommy
@shortstop:
I know that is it. He just has always voted Republican so it is habit for lack of a better word. My mother was the same until recently. She turned because I’d say she is a feminist. She could no longer handle their views on birth control, sex education, abortion.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: There’s been a lot of middling-to-decent press about the lengths the anti-LGBT crowd have gone to in order to quash SSM and other LGBT issues. One look at the handling of Question 1 in Maine and Proposition 8 in CA is enough to show how dirty the opposition plays – and there’ve been a lot of stories on that item, so for anyone not embedded in Fauxnewsworld the dirty tricks are starting to show. Once people start seeing how thoroughly unpleasant and unethical the anti-SSM crowd behaves they start bailing on the effort. The anti-SSM Conservatists are their own worst enemy in some respects, and their tactics are turning away more people than they’re bringing in.
boatboy_srq
@shortstop: Since cooking, flower-arranging, imagery, etc. have a history as stereotypical gay professions, I can’t help but think that in at least some cases these people are complaining that the business segments they took from G(LBT) enterprises have to cater to the very people whose livelihoods they tried to usurp.
OzarkHillbilly
@Don K: Well a week or 2 in jail with commensurate fines for contempt of court will probably quiet down a lot of that.
NonyNony
@boatboy_srq:
Eh – is that true?
In my experience what brings people around is a friend/family member who comes out as gay. The stories we hear the most about are the fundie parents who disown the kid and kick them out of the family, and that does happen. But among my friends it’s been pretty much the reverse – coming out to their parents has caused their parents to re-evaluate a whole lot of stuff in their own lives. Some have left their churches (to find other churches, for the most part) because of it. It’s a game changer in a way that has honestly surprised me.
shawn
I’ve never understood the opposition for this issue. Abortion I get why that should be opposed, but for gay marriage I just don’t know why anybody cares. If anything you would gain some votes from rich gay people who love being rich as much as rich straight people. You’d also take away a major reason people run from the GOP. This is perhaps the only (other) issue you don’t need to know a ton of extra information to form a truly informed opinion. Voting intelligently about war and economics require a vast amount of information and an understanding of that info that the lay person simply doesn’t have time for. If you oppose it you make it easy for people to point to one thing and say, this is why they are evil. Yes, the Right has the abortion issue that fits my little parameter as well but that one is worth fighting for and I bet there are some gay pro-lifer’s out there. You’re not a Demorat across the board just because you’re gay.
I do not think this issue is going to change in the polls because minds will change – they won’t. It is going to change because people will die of old age. The Right’s inexplicable opposition of the issue is matched by the Left’s vitriol for people who do. Nobody does anything that will change somebody’s mind – they just tell you you are the worst person ever for thinking what you do.
Paul in KY
@Tommy: That’s why you should enlist your mom. She knows him as well as anybody.
boatboy_srq
@NonyNony: There were a lot of people in Maine who were hoodwinked by the Q1 canvassers. They were told the question was the opposite of what it was. There was a big scandal up there when the deception was exposed as a deliberate effort; voters were p!ssed and the Reichwing lost a good bit of backing after that. I hear similar stories from friends in CA about Prop 8. The Reichwing deliberately misrepresents its efforts, misleads the people voting the Reichwing’s way, sucks in funds from across the country and trumpets that as “local” fundraising, etc. The more those stories get out the less rank-and-file support they’re likely to maintain.
LePage is Teahad, true, but he won on a very split ticket: do the math and about 65% voted in opposition to him twice in a row (just not in a way that would actually kick him out): that’s significant in itself.
Kerry Reid
@WereBear: I agree. Unlike racial bias, which is often both a product and a symptom of how segregated many parts of this country continue to be along racial lines (so it’s often easy to say without lying that you don’t have any black or Asian or Latino friends or neighbors), it’s harder and harder for most people these days to claim that they never have met anyone who is gay.
I expect politics-of-resentment pushback in pockets. But I don’t see it having any real future. Not that homophobia itself will completely go away, but its use as a deliberate and cynical political wedge issue will be less and less efficacious. At least, I hope!
boatboy_srq
@shawn:
If there’s vitriol on the Left over this, it’s in large part due to the rabid anti-gay-anything the Right has been pushing for half a century. Look up Box Turtle Bulletin’s “Today in History” entries and you’ll see what a nasty, hateful mess the Right has been spewing on this since at least the 50s. The LGBT community tried playing nice; it took people getting beaten up on the streets of the East Village for anything to change. Vitriol is merited here.
You’d be amazed at the number of Randian Objectivist LGBT people out there.
Joey Maloney
@Jay C:
The one thing you can count on full-metal wingnuts not to do is think things through. There’s a woman in Missouri who will be suing to overturn the state’s 3-day waiting period for abortion services, on the grounds that as a Satanist it infringes on her religious belief in bodily autonomy. There’s a church in Indianapolis which claims sparking up as a sacrament. There’s the statue of Baphomet blessing two little children which will soon be on the Oklahoma state capitol lawn. And there’s plenty more – some of them dead serious, others determined monkeywrenchers – waiting in the wings. The wingnuts’ right to publicly hate on buttsex will only come at the cost of giving up slutshaming. Or getting the state in the business of deciding if a religion is sufficiently Republican to be legitimate, and that will land them in Federal court in a rootless cosmopolitan New York minute.
And I’ll be laughing my ass off.
shortstop
@boatboy_srq: All true and all despicable. But I don’t think anyone who’s not closely following the politics and tactics of the marriage equality fight knows about any of it. My husband and I have been very active on his issue. Most of our friends are staunchly pro-equality and I doubt half of them could tell you what exactly went on with the Prop 8 campaign,
much less in Maine.
TG Chicago
Of course none of this will stop rightwingers in the year 2115 from declaring that it was actually conservatives that fought for and won marriage equality.
Tokyokie
@Jay C: In Oklahoma, lawmakers are contemplating legislation that would do away with civil marriage and reserve it exclusively for religious groups (Christian denominations only). Yeah, that’s going to pass constitutional muster. But it will take some time and expense to excise that lunacy from the state code.
NonyNony
@shawn:
If you think opposition to abortion comes from some deep-seated desire to protect fetuses, then you have no way of understanding why gay marriage is such a hot button issue for the right-wing religious voter.
Opposition to abortion didn’t come with Roe v. Wade being decided. In fact many evangelicals applauded the ruling. Catholics were upset but that was about it. Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been on this beat for years – here’s a primer. (One nice choice quote: “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” – that came from the Baptist Press right after the Roe decision. Fred has other examples – including the examples of silence which I think are far more damning. Nobody cared in 1973).
Abortion became a hot button issue for evangelicals because it was a way to tie together conservative evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics into a coalition. The Roman Catholics didn’t really care about the conservative evangelical obsession with race (and make no mistake – conservative evangelical fundamentalism in the US exists mainly because of justifications of racism rooted in “literal reading” of the King James Bible), but DID care an awful lot about sexual behavior. It was the thing that the early 20th century Popes drew a line in the sand about in their perpetual war against Protestants – no birth control, no abortion, nothing that would allow women any kind of control over their own destinies.
Once you know that it all falls into place. These stances on controlling sexual behavior are all part of the conservative tribal identity forged in the 70s and perfected in the 80s. What was once a marriage of convenience between different factions has become actual beliefs. The Catholic Church has won the hearts of right-wing fundamentalists – in an irony I’d laugh about if it hadn’t made our country’s politics so goddamned messed up.
(Though the toxic stew of right-wing fundamentalism and right-wing Catholicism tying itself to Republicanism in the US is now turning off younger believers and forcing them out of churches in droves. That’s an irony that this “atheist raised as a liberal Catholic” can find it in myself to laugh heartily about.)
jl
I’ve never figured out how the civil disobedience is supposed to work. Human chains around bakeries that only let straight people in to order wedding cakes.
I guess it means egging on any government willing to waste its time and money to pass knowing in-your-face unconstitutional laws and ordinances? That won’t do much for long, will it? Won’t there be federal lawsuits and damages? And vast majority of businesses won’t want to be stigmatized as both hatefully bigoted and lawless.
Seanly
My concern is the states, like TX right now, passing laws to say that state officials can’t use state money to issue marriage certificates. Or in AL where the chief of probate (?IIRC) told his people not to issue licenses…
Would the TX law be a violation of due process? It just seems like a very mean-spirited way to flout the law and I can’t imagine it would be legal.
Seanly
Okay, Americans United has a post about Texas HB 623 which I mentioned in my previous post. So, really the bill is just a stupid way of trolling…
Matt McIrvin
@Tokyokie: Actually, the bill got amended to allow judges to marry people again. It’s been passed by the House, and now nobody can say precisely what it does… they might have just eliminated state marriage licenses entirely:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/03/13/3633556/is-this-real-life/
I suppose one thing it does is let judges who don’t like same-sex marriages refuse to officiate them.
shawn
@boatboy_srq: “Vitriol is merited here.” Ok, good point. I think though that you have to take the high road and that is how you win the silent majority. You’ll never change the mind of somebody would would beat up a person just for being gay and calling everybody the names that really apply to the fringe just doesn’t make sense to me. You need the silent majority on the other side to win this argument. That goes both way by the way and I hope I am as strong a voice against some of the crazy pro-lifers as I should be while still opposing abortion. All that said, I realize I am talking about just “name calling” which can’t even be compared to actual violence, so yeah.
Chris
@NonyNony:
Yeah. It took me a while to grok this too, but the dissonance gets louder and louder when you see all the stuff that goes around the abortion debate beyond just “protect the baby!” For one thing, they’re equally energetic in banning, or making impossible to acquire, all forms of birth control that could prevent the egg from being fertilized and therefore avoid the issue altogether (e.g. condoms). And this is, in fact, advocated usually as part of the same campaign as their campaign against abortion as if the two went together. For another, they’re all about removing all measures in the safety net that could help to take care of the baby after it’s born.
There’s absolutely no way to take seriously any claims that the baby’s life is their primary concern here. At best, their primary concern is the enforcement of religious dogma WRT the role of women (they must bear children, for that is their role, and if that causes problems for them, they should have nowhere to turn to but the church, to maximize our ability to control them). At worst… exactly what you said.
opiejeanne
@Tommy: I I know this is tough to hear but if your dad is elderly, (in his 80s or older) you may have no choice but to just love him for the good man he is and stop worrying about how he votes. Life is too short and you don’t want this to be your last conversation with him. Trust me on this one.
I had to start telling my dad that I wasn’t going to have this argument with him when he was about 80, that this wasn’t how I wanted to spend what time we had left together in partisan wrangling, and then I proceeded to produce evidence that I could dismember any argument he wanted to try. (I love the internet because I can’t remember specifics to save a bean. ) He listened and we had a good relationship until his death at age 94. The stupid thing was that he really was a Democrat when he laid out his beliefs and stuff, but he listened to Rush Limbaugh and got excited about a lot of nonsense. He missed out on some movies that were just standard sic-fi movies that he would have loved, prior to Rush deciding that they were anti-American propaganda for tree-huggers.
He died in 2012 and I miss him every day.
Chris
@opiejeanne:
I’ve encountered the same thing with quite a few Republicans their own age. If you can find a way to tear their head away from the whole partisan you-unamerican-traitors, us-good-team-patriotic bullshit and actually think about what they want, what they would do if they were in office, often you’ll get stuff that’s verbatim what Obama is doing now or what the more liberal wing of the party wishes he’d do. But it does no good to point that out: the minute they find out that it is, in fact, a liberal policy, they’ll recoil in horror.
Tribalism is a hell of a drug.
opiejeanne
@shortstop: I suffered from the same affliction as your mom until I was about 40, even though I had stopped voting for Republicans at age 30 with a couple of notable exceptions. By age 40 it was nearly impossible to find a sane one and while I was still allergic to Democrats as a group due to my upbringing, I held my nose and voted for the better candidate. More and more that better candidate was a Democrat, and when I volunteered for various local non-partisan campaigns I realized that most of the people I supported were actually Democrats. Hmmmm.
Change is hard, it really is, but like your mom I also feel freed and relieved. I never bothered to change my party registration but now I live in Washington and they don’t bother with it so I’m not registered as anything, which suits me, and I find my upper lip curling into a sneer any time a Republican is mentioned because the scales have fallen from my eyes. .
opiejeanne
@Chris: At Dad’s funeral his minister was talking to me and expressed surprise that I was a liberal (I don’t remember how it came up). I smiled and said, “If Dad didn’t want to raise me to be a liberal, he shouldn’t have taken me to Sunday School every week when I was a kid.” The minister laughed.
Ella in New Mexico
@satby:
Neither could my husband’s older sister, a Democrat. She called her brother up and basically said that very thing-” How can you guys belong to and vote for a Party that negates and denigrates your daughter’s very right to be a full human being?”
He was insulted, apparently, and told my husband recently about her call. “Can you imagine that? Why would she do that?” My husband replied, “oh, I can imagine why.” :-)