Ramesh Ponnuru responds today to Family Research Council head Kenneth Connor’s apoplexy that the head of the RNC, Marc Racicot, actually met with the largest gay group, the Human Rights Campaign. At first, the religious right complained that the meeting had occurred at all; Connor then finessed this by saying that his complaint was that the RNC head met with HRC in secret. I’m not sure it was “secret.” I heard about it the day it happened. With 300 people in the audience, it’s unlikely such an event would remain under wraps. Then Ponnuru takes on Connor’s threat that social conservatives will walk if Bush reaches out in any measure to gay voters and their families, or indeed to the huge majority of Americans who believe gay peole should be protected from discrimination in the workplace:
Connor notes that there was a drop-off in evangelical voting in the 2000 election, and suggests that there will be another one if Republicans do not take up the social-conservative cause on gay rights more vigorously. He provides no evidence that the drop-off was caused by evangelical unhappiness with the Republican party on gay issues, rather than by, say, the decay of certain Christian-conservative groups that used to turn out voters. He cites no polls on the degree of evangelical satisfaction with the president or the Republican party today. And he provides no argument that social-conservative voters would be wise to abandon Bush next year over his gay-rights record. If social conservatives really were inclined to do anything so foolish, which I very much doubt, I hope that their leaders would try to wise them up.
All good points. There’s more than a little bluff here. The religious right has been in sharp decline for a while now. They are swiftly losing public support in their continued resistance to any recognition of gay citizens’ civil rights. The younger conservative generation is nowhere near as uncomfortable around gay people as their predecessors, and see modest outreach tp gays as a no-brainer. At some point, the president will have to choose between appeasing a small but angry cadre of religious activists, and becoming a truly inclusive president.
The Dish 