Top GOP Pollster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues

[Tx4obama]

Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays and lesbians, it is in danger of marginalizing itself to irrelevance or worse.

Read the bluntness of this. This is the GOP establishment talking to itself. And the Republican pollster who arguably knows more about the politics of the gay issue than anyone else (how else to explain the Ohio campaign of 2004?) is advising them in no uncertain terms that they need to evolve and fast, if they're not going to damage their brand for an entire generation:

-snip-

Rest of article and memo here: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/top-gop-pollster-to-gop-reverse-on-gay-issues.html

[brewens]

1. Think about what the rights goal must be. Force gay people back to the status

they had in the 60's I guess? Back when like Rmoney says, we didn't think about it or talk about it.

I'm all for making the gay issues go away. Only by letting them have their civil rights so no one bothers to talk about it much. Not because we beat them back into the closet. How do they expect to win that one? If they could, they already would have.

[Tx4obama]

2. Did you read the whole article on the link in the OP? n/t

[brewens]

4. Yes. I was commenting on the rabid right-wing anti gay people that

the pollster would hope to persuade. Like from Steppenwolf-"Keep Off The grass Sam". "Give up, you allready lost the fight, alright."

[napoleon_in_rags]

5. You're right on. There are basically four groups.

1) Gay people, about 10%. They are very concerned with it.
2) People like me, who have friends in, and are strong supports of the LBGT community, but are more or less strait (give or take a night or two) But are strong supports of their rights. Maybe 12%
3) Completely strait people, who really DO NOT CARE about what law abiding gay people are doing in their own homes. They are concerned with their families, the economy, and the real issues affecting America right now. Some of them don't practice homosexuality for religious reasons, but they are like Hindus who don't eat meat in India - they don't think forced vegetarianism is what the government should be pouring their money into when it has huge issues, they care about substantial problems. About 75%.
4) The 3% of "strait" people who spend all their time obsessing on what homosexuals are doing, setting up camps to "cure" them, and preaching to huge crowds about their beliefs on homosexuality they just can't stop thinking about:

edit add on: What its about in the end is tyranny. What is the actual mechanism of enforcement that the 4th group proposes? A camera in every bedroom so "wholesome" government workers, like the TSA can make sure chuck and Buck aren't consummating their love like a married couple? That 75% are wise to see the shell game, and to be focusing on and demanding results on real issues. And those Christians concerned about having their rights abridged as far as their churches right to define marriage on its own terms? To them I remind: You guys lived in an empire with total world control the fed you to lions, and you prevailed. You think the church is threatened by this? Open your Bibles to Psalm 46:10, sit down and pray on it, and chill out.

[polichick]

11. imo group #4 is mostly made up of people fearful that they are gay...

...and want somebody to stop them.

[napoleon_in_rags]

12. Agreed. Like I always say: a cat and a salad =

is like a strait man and homosexuality: The cat doesn't fear the salad, the cat doesn't hate the salad, the cat does not anxiously try to control the salad, the cat does not condemn the desire to partake in the salad, rather the cat is simply uninterested in the salad. It's focused on a different type of food.

[polichick]

13. Exactly.

[dbackjon]

3. Good find

[gateley]

6. Someone jokingly posted that Mitt Romney was taking responsibility for

accepting gay marriage. This memo shows the Republicans just how to do that and promote it as a conservative value.

Unfortunately (for them), I think they've dug themselves too far into a hole on this one. Serves them right.

[RZM]

7. I don't think this will amount to much

Though maybe I'm wrong. But tons of these policy memos are sent out everyday. Most are read and then discarded. The idea that the key to Republican success is more outreach is almost always ridiculously wrong. Outreach tends to get them scorn and not votes. There is no way they will be able to buck their base on this in the next few years. 10-20 years from now might be a different story. But for now, they will stay against marriage equality.

[Bolo Boffin]

8. Yes, Romney is throwing his support of adoption by same sex couples under the bus

Ed Gillespie just said they would campaign on ending marriage equality in ALL the states, not just blocking recognition in the states that don't want to. Madness, total madness.

[AlinPA]

9. It is falling on hateful GOP peoples' ears that are not listening.

[DCBob]

10. There is no way the GOP will reverse course on this issue..

gay hate is a core RW prinicipal.

[stubtoe]

14. This is like when the Berlin wall fell. Or the end of Apartheid.

Or other seismic shifts in collective consciousness that occurred when something that seemed so permanent and impenetrable, for so long, suddenly collapsed under its own weight.

President Obama, in just a few words, at just the right time, has triggered one of those moments of societal attitude adjustment. A real paradigm shift.

Reading this article, and the talking points memo it discusses, convinces me of that.

When Republican strategists take the trouble to point this out, the change is already underway.

[joshcryer]

15. This is merely an obvious fact. This is the death knell of the GOP, because they can't handle fact.

They will be unable to adapt, they will be unable to "evolve" as it were. They would have to at the minimum sacrifice someone to pull off such a paradigm shift after having embraced the tea party bigots in 2010. Lose big time, bleed the bigots off, have a scape goat so as to not show that the party had to make such a shift. It's just not possible at this point in time, they rely on those 30% of bigoted Americans to get elected, they rely on them a lot, it's just an insurmountable challenge. They can't do it. The party is on its death bed.