Give Up the Losing Fight on Gay Rights, GOP

Recovering from an otherwise devastating election, some conservatives believe they have found a silver lining amidst the rubble: the continuing salience of “culture war” issues in general, and the subject of gay rights in particular. At a National Review post-election symposium seeking to answer the question, “Whither Conservatism?” social conservatives Maggie Gallagher, Jeffrey Bell and Ed Whelan all encouraged conservatives to stress gay issues even more in the future, and most everyone in the audience nodded in agreement. Rich Lowry, the editor of that magazine, recently wrote a column declaring “No way, no how,” to those calling for a détente in the battle over gay marriage and abortion. And last month, Richard Cizik, the former chief lobbyist of the National Association of Evangelicals, was fired after he expressed support for gay civil unions, a foreboding sign that the country’s politically active evangelicals do not intend to abandon their hard-line stance against any legal recognition of gay relationships.

At first glance, social conservatives have reason for optimism. In November, Arkansas voters overwhelmingly passed a law banning gay adoption and anti-gay marriage amendments succeeded in Florida, Arizona and, California, the latter victory giving conservatives the most hope seeing that it occurred in the country’s most populous (and one of its most liberal) states. Some conservatives have grown drunk off the wine of this triumph, citing the 70% support among African-Americans to ban gay marriage as a sign that a significant portion of this most reliable of Democratic voting blocs could potentially be poached if the GOP stresses its anti-gay bona fides even more. While these victories at the polls may be heartening to the base of the Republican Party, the continued propagation of policies opposed to the advancement of the gay rights agenda will doom the GOP for a generation.

Given the fact that nearly 40 states have passed laws in some way or another defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the notion that conservatives should drop gay issues may seem counterintuitive. But these successes are illusory. America has witnessed a sea change in attitudes on the subject of homosexuality over the past 35 years. In 1973, for instance, 73% of Americans viewed same-sex relations as “always wrong.” In 2006, that figure stood at 56%. In February of 2004, 61% of Americans supported banning gay marriage; two years later that figure dropped to just 51%. Likewise, support for the right of gays to serve openly in the military now stands at nearly 80% (a majority of Americans opposed open service when it first became a national controversy in the early months of the first Clinton administration), and about half of Americans support allowing gays to adopt children.

The reason for this liberalization of attitudes has much to do with the increasing (as well as increasingly benign) visibility of gay people in everyday life. But it’s also attributable to the growing acceptance of younger Americans, including evangelicals, who are far more liberal on the issue of homosexuality than their elders. While 52% of Californians voted in favor of Proposition 8, 61% of Californians aged 18-29 voted against stripping gay couples of the right to marry. A poll published in November found that 58% of young white evangelicals support either marriage (26%) or civil unions (32%) for gay couples (by contrast, only 9% of white evangelicals over 30 support gay marriage). It’s important to note that this increasing acceptance of homosexuality among younger Americans does not indicate a more general liberal political outlook, as they are also more opposed to abortion than their elders. (For instance, 70% of younger evangelicals support “making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion,” compared to 39% of older ones). Younger Americans are making a conscious, harm-based distinction between the costs of abortion and the apparent lack of harm in allowing gay people to marry.

Ah, but some social conservatives say, these numbers will change as younger generations become older. “Until the younger generation starts to get married and begin families, it is probably too soon to declare traditional civil marriage dead,” writes Kevin Vance in the Weekly Standard. But is there any correlation between getting older and becoming more hostile to the notion of gay marriage?

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain," is an old adage often misattributed to Winston Churchill. Trite as the sentiment might seem, it was a keen observation: as people age and begin to bear the burdens of life that their parents once assumed for them – paying taxes, tuitions and mortgages, buying the groceries and the car insurance – they become more conservative. With responsibility comes an appreciation for frugality, prudence and a belated respect for tradition. On economic issues, it’s obvious why the older are more conservative than the younger; the socialist illusions of an idealistic college student whose tuition is paid for by his parents are scotched once that young man becomes a working stiff and learns first hand the realities of caring for oneself and putting food on the table for a family.

While people tend to become more conservative on a whole array of issues as they age, there is no reason to think that homosexuality is one of those issues. People understandably adopt a more traditional notion of marriage and family as they get older, get married, and have children – realizing the emptiness of the dominant “hook-up” ethos in high school and university – but there’ s no logical reason for a newfound appreciation of “family values” to also include hostility to homosexuality. Indeed, the adoption of a more conservative stance on “family values,” namely, a comprehension of the importance of the family structure and a disapproval of divorce, single-parenting and promiscuity, ought to imply support for gay marriage, acknowledging it as the establishment of a stabilizing institution for a minority group (gay men especially) that, up until recently, never had such legal options and were discouraged from “assimilating” by the prevailing homosexual subculture.

Indeed, believing in the importance of “traditional marriage” and gay marriage are not mutually exclusive. While conservatives had some cause to critique the emerging gay liberation movement of the 1970’s for its liberationist, politically radical tinge, today’s generation of gay activists are as much committed to stabilizing institutions and the integration of gay people into mainstream life as their predecessors were in mobilizing gays into some sexual vanguard. Whereas the gay Left decried gay marriage as patriarchic and sexist less than two decades ago – and vilified the gay writers, nearly all self-identified conservatives and libertarians, who advocated it – the gay movement has now embraced marriage as its signature cause. Conservatives should see the near-universal support for marriage rights among gays as a vindication of traditionalism and assimilation in a community that was once marinated in the tenets of socialism, sexual revolution and anti-establishment dogma. Conservatives are absolutely right to decry the breakdown of the family and the negative effects it has had on American society, but wrong to list the increased acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage as being an element of that more general societal decline.

It’s not just the young who are becoming more liberal on the matter of gay rights. Older generations have altered their attitudes on the subject in part due to the dramatic changes in the way homosexuality has been portrayed by the mainstream media (once as a threatening, diseased minority, gays are now recognized as members of local communities, respected professionals, public figures, etc.), as well as by their own personal interactions with gay family members, friends and colleagues.

Although it’s impossible to forecast just how important the issue of gay rights will be in the coming years, I predict that it will gain even more prominence in voters’ minds. That’s because the 18-35 cohort views the acceptance of gay people as equal citizens as the civil rights cause of its generation (cynical attempts by conservatives to inflame gay vs. black animus by falsely claiming that gay rights activists attempt to equate the modern-day plight of gays who can’t marry to blacks who couldn’t vote will backfire). While today’s young don’t show the same voter turnout rates as their elders, they will inevitably form a larger part of the electorate and will be less comfortable voting for a party that denies equality to their many openly gay friends and colleagues (and that uses gays as a wedge issue to win elections). Sticking to anti-gay politics will cast off a whole generation of voters from the GOP.

Of course, there is no single issue that lost the election for McCain, and it’s beyond my powers of analysis to conclude whether the GOP’s positions on issues like gay rights, abortion and stem cells were the reason for its defeat. McCain faced an uphill battle in a particularly bad climate for Republicans, and it’s more likely that the faltering economy and a historically unpopular Republican president played the decisive role. But the fact that social conservatism wasn’t the primary reason, or even a reason at all, for the GOP’s recent losses doesn’t mean that the party’s continued reliance on anti-gay politics will not be a problem in the future.

Conservatives face a stark choice. They can succumb to the short-term temptation of erstwhile electoral victory and continue to support regressive policies on gay rights that are fast going out of fashion. Or they can look at the statistics, talk to their younger colleagues, coolly survey the direction in which the culture is inevitably headed, and plan accordingly. This doesn’t necessarily require the GOP to support gay marriage, just to stand out of the way of what’s coming. A properly conservative party does not just wish to preserve the useful traditions of the past, but to adapt those traditions for the future.