The Marriage Equality Dividend

What with the issue of Marriage Equality front and center these days as Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act under judicial review by the Supremes I have come to realize that the issue of Marriage Equality is going to pay huge dividends to the Liberal Movement in (hopefully) the near future.

 

See, the rightwing Evangelical wing of the ultraconservative Republican base, the people who you can count on to show up at primaries and vote for batguano crazy Republican candidates are mightily concerned what with all the Republicans going on the record as being in favor of Marriage Equality (aka Gay Marriage). This is not to their liking and they are making large huffing and puffing sounds laced with spittle and bad breath calling these Republicans out.

And threatening them.

Threatening them with organizing a third party.

A third party, these days, would turn the Republican Party into what one of these actors labeled as “a permanent minority.” And not just the Republican Party, they themselves will be in a permanent minority.

The nice thing is that this will free up the Republicans who stay behind to negotiate with Democrats again because they will no longer fear being primaried by Evangelicals and other crazies. And Democrats will enjoy a comfortable majority status for the foreseeable future.

No, I’m serious. When you hear it from one Evangelical, well that’s just idle chatter. But when you hear it from another, and another, that’s a trend.

Even if the separate statements are found on the same website.

Here, Mike Huckabee threatens “that if they [Republicans] support same-sex marriage, evangelicals will form a third party.”

And here, “Tony Perkins is threatening a possible third party if the GOP abandons its evangelical base and supports same-sex marriage.” Perkins is President of the ultraconservative Family Research Council.

Huckabee was waxing poetic in his statements. Poetic because his opinion of what an “objective standard” is would make poets all over the world gag and vomit. Get this one:

“I have great sympathy and extraordinary admiration for Sen. Portman. I consider him a friend and I value his work in the Senate and think he’s a great person. The mistake is that we sometimes base our public policy decisions on how we feel, how we think, maybe even some personal experiences, and we don’t regard a lot of these issues from the standpoint of an objective standard”

Not that’s just fun. It’s obvious that Huckabee believes that an objective standard comes from several verses in Leviticus.

Leviticus is now an “objective standard.”