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I've lived in rural areas and in one big city. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that the local gay population even reaches 5%. But let's assume it does nationally.
Among that 5%, couples who want to marry seem to be a *very* small number. And I mean marriage in the traditional sense, a couple united for life for the purpose of raising children. I'm not talking about open marriage where the 'spouses' get to date and have sex with anyone they want. I call those kind of spouses 'roommates'.
Judging by the number of civil union ceremonies we've seen, it's not clear that the gay marriage issue is even the top issue with gays. I'd guess that maybe 25% support it strongly. The rest? They don't have such a strong view on it or see other issues as a higher priority.
It's difficult to imagine that we're talking about even 1% of the general population actually wanting to marry a person of the same sex. I think it's less than half of that because I've known a lot of gays but only a handful of monogamous couples. Certainly they exist. But it is a small number.
I don't think it is helpful to pretend that the issue of gay marriage is the single most important one for the gay community at large. Many of them might tell you they are more interested in anti-discrimination in housing and in employment than they are in social or legal recognition of a monogamous relationship.
You also don't seem to recognize that imposing gay marriage will undoubtedly increase competition for the children available for adoption. I'm quite sure the large numbers of people who have adopted or want to adopt and their extended families simply don't want to increase competition for those kids. It's not like there's a great surplus of kids to adopt and raise. So there's a very practical issue here. Marriage has been tied to childrearing from ancient times. And it still is.
Regardless of the merits of gay marriage, if it is the single most distinctive issue in your platform and legislative agenda, you can't be surprised if your opponents use it against you. This was true in many elections where pro-lifers like Dole lost to pro-choicers and complained about it. Same is true of Bush Senior (big pro-choicer) losing the primary to Reagan and being forced to repudiate his career of promoting pro-choice in the GOP in order to become VP and then president. But as we observe that in past decades that the pro-lifers very likely cost the GOP some elections or forced their candidates to embrace a pro-life position they didn't agree with, so we have to recognize that the tide may be going out on abortion and gay marriage, not coming in. So Democrats in the past benefitted in many states from pro-choice positions. Now that pro-life is benefitting the GOP, we can't somehow pretend that it's only legitimate for voters to express their ideas on the issues if they vote for Democrats.
Politics is like that. Sometimes an issue which won you votes for decades can turn into a loser until you correct your course and align yourselves with the voters. It's a thing they call democracy. You've probably heard of it.
Now, maybe a GOP candidate blaming the party's pro-life position is just an excuse offered for a poor campaign or an unattractive candidate. But there is little doubt in my mind that for many years, the pro-life vote cost the GOP elections. And some of this had to do with generational issues, about people who, as they aged, didn't really seem to realize that birth control and family planning had changed over the years.
During the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies, you had a voting population who was accustomed to failure of birth control. Condoms and spermicides and diaphragms were often ineffective, even in the hands of calm and determined married couples. Let alone teenagers. I'd say that most of us born in that era were born despite our parents' efforts to do family planning.
Now, even though the Pill changed all that starting in the Sixties, it took a while for it to become more universal and for it to really sink in.
Today, most people are and have been in a very different situation reproductively than their parents were. Women take the Pill. And when a couple has decided they don't want more kids, the husband routinely gets a vasectomy, generally because most husbands don't want their wives to continue to take the Pill for health reasons. Vasectomy simply wasn't an option, medically or culturally until the last fifteen years.
So what we see is something of a change in attitude toward the entire family planning issues facing middle- and upper-class people, i.e. those who do most of the voting. I thought I'd also mention that most American Catholics are either practicing birth control or they lost interest in sex in the last generation because the size of R.C. families has declined noticably. Another issue that once played strongly was the plight of the rape victim. But it is routine procedure now to prescribe morning-after drugs to prevent a fertilized egg from attaching. So a little more of the wind is dropping out of the sails of the good ship Abortiana.
You know, to hear the shrill pro-choice element talk about it, you'd think the average woman in America gets a couple of abortions a year. But it simply isn't true.
I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. The capture of the Party by abortion and gay marriage activists is serving a very small base of voters whose numbers are likely to actually decrease as a percentage of the total voter base. I'm not talking about the merits of either as a civil right. I'm talking about who thinks it's important enough to base their vote on those issues alone.
The same thing already applies to gun control, an issue which national Democrats have learned to back away from because of how much it accelerated the realignment of the South toward the GOP, starting in '94 with the Gingrich congress. And on the gun issue, many Democrats may be surprised to learn that gun groups like NRA and GOA were going to be hard pressed to withhold their endorsement from a Dean candidacy because Dean was governor of Vermont, the state with the most liberal CCW laws in America. And Bush kept saying he was willing to sign the AWB. So Dean had absolutely no liabilities on gun issues and didn't even have to run around dressing in camo and talking about hunting. The GOP knew that Dean couldn't be tarred as anti-gun. Kerry, OTOH, did make some speeches and cast some votes over the years that were used against him. To the credit of the Kerry campaign, he largely succeeded in neutralizing the effort to use the gun rights issue against him. This was pretty important for his campaign in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The extreme secularism of certain elements of the Party has certainly accelerated to the decline of Democrats in the South as well. In the Bible Belt, religion and politics are and always have been intertwined. Whether you like it or not.
Anyway, you can rant all you want and get all puffed up and call everyone a homophobe. But you can't make more them vote for what you want, no matter what you say to them. The numbers simply are not there and are unlikely to be there in coming years. Ultimately, we may see popular opinion on the matter change over the next decade with more voters and elements in both parties gaining ground on the gay marriage issue. Much of the reason why we saw the GOP make such effective use of the issue was because they were able to present the actions of the S.C. in MA as a threat that would impose gay marriage on all fifty states. This was a tremendous influence on the outcome of the gay marriage bans. The voters simply did not want to have gay marriage rammed down their throats by less than a dozen state supreme court justices from a little state most of us have never visited. It is a situation comparable to how Democrats feel about Bush having been selected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000. There's no way to feel good about our political life and discourse being completely set aside by less than a dozen judges somewhere.
I think the focus of abortion rights and gay marriage rights will devolve increasingly upon the states. Depending on the Bush appointments to the S.C., it could happen in the next few years. Abortion and gay marriage advocates need to focus on developing organizations to advocate their cause to the public but especially in state courts by using the rights guaranteed by state constitutions. The ACLU has done this with considerable success for decades. By adopting this practical solution on the advocacy of gay marriage and abortion rights, you will have a more practical basis for success and will not force the national Democratic party to identified with issues that are losing elections for them in the present political climate.
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