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Will the next Republican nominee for President support gay marriage? It is a question that was unthinkable years ago, but amid a rapid shift in public opinion and demographics, it is being seriously considered in GOP circles.

“At the rate this issue is changing within the party, I think it’s not out of the question,” said Margaret Hoover, a former George W. Bush White House aide and one of the leading Republican Party operatives calling for the recognition of same-sex marriages. “It’s not if, it’s when — 2016 or 2020,” said another Republican operative.

The confidence to even ask the question is buoyed by a sea change in Republican Party thinking on the issue over the past several weeks. Dozens of top party operatives and former politicians — including six former aides to Mitt Romney and seven current or former members of Congress — have signed onto an amicus brief supporting the legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8 in advance of oral arguments on the constitutionality of the gay-marriage ban. Ohio Senator Rob Portman endorsed gay marriage on Friday after revealing that his son is gay. And new polling has brought to light a clear shift in the opinions of Republicans and the nation at large.

Indeed, that was one of the key recommendations in the Republican Party’s 2012 autopsy: a critical need to soften the party’s position on gay marriage, which has become a threshold issue for many young voters.

That comes barely six months since the party ratified its 2012 platform at the Republican Convention including a reaffirmation of its call for a marriage amendment to the Constitution and a defense of the Boy Scouts of America for banning gay scouts and troop leaders.

But evangelical opponents of same-sex marriage are predicting a swift and powerful backlash against the establishment driving the moderation.

But an ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week found that 52% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters ages 18 to 49 back gay marriage — the highest percentage ever recorded — with 81% of 18- to 29-year-olds supporting overall.

Alex Lundry, the director of data science for Romney’s campaign and a signatory to the amicus brief, described the past several weeks as a “pivotal moment” for the Republican Party on the issue, highlighting growth in a 24% increase in support among white evangelical Protestants and a 23% increase in self-identified conservatives over the past nine years.

“Evangelical millennials are 64% in favor of allowing same-sex couples to marry,” he said. “This idea that there’s going to be a grassroots surge in opposition to establishment republicans who are coming out for this is hyperbolic. They’re moving, everyone’s moving.”


At the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference — to which Republican gay-marriage-supporting groups like GOProud were formally not invited — a panel urging moderation on the issue packed a small conference room. The organization’s executive director Jimmy LaSalvia told the assembled audience that the party needs to accept LGBT Americans if it wants to stop hemorrhaging young voters. “There are a few in our movement who just don’t like gay people, and in 2013 that’s just not O.K. anymore,” he said. “If we don’t publicly stand up to the bigots, then everyone assumes we agree with them … How can we expect [young voters] to listen if they think that conservatives hate their families and friends.”

Even a casual survey finds that the vast majority of the Republican establishment under the age of 40 — the professional communicators, strategists and policy wonks — are all quietly supportive of same-sex marriage.

And while some of the “elephants” are coming out — Brad Dayspring, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a former aide to House majority leader Eric Cantor, publicly voiced his opposition to bans on gay marriage after the Portman announcement — it’s equally true that Republican candidates and elected officials have been slower to move on the issue than the people who work for them.Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/03/21/why-republicans-are-saying-i-do-t
o-gay-marriage/#ixzz2OfDq8NvI

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