Big Gay Picture: The Coming Republican Anti-Gay Crap-fest

No pundit will tell you this, but I think it’ll be worse — much worse — for two simple reasons:

First, as we’re now learning more about the inner workings of the last presidential campaign, it’s come out that Republican strategists were recommending ever more scurrilous depths to which, incredibly, even John McCain wouldn’t sink. But don’t doubt for a minute that Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, or — yes — Sarah Palin won’t go national with the “gay card” in the 2012 election, playing it with abandon.

Palin, Huckabee & Romney: likely 2012 Republican presidential candidates

But second, there are the unmistakable results of this last election: a sweeping anti-gay vote even in the face of a Democratic wave, even in California, one of the most liberal states in the country.

This is a country that is still firmly, resolutely anti-gay, not just on the marriage issue, but also on the issue of same-sex adoption (a ban passed this year by a wide margin in Arkansas). Yes, there are those who cite polls saying that the country is roughly split, at least on the issue of civil unions, just as there were those who cited pre-election polls that showed Proposition 8 losing.

But we’ve now lost a total of 30 out of 30 of these marriage fights. True, the vote was closer in California than in 2000, when same-sex marriage lost by more than 20 points, but how much of that tightening was simply due to the nature of this year’s vote, which was phrased as to do something so drastic as literally take away existing rights?

Unlike abortion and other social issues, the marriage issue also has the added advantage for Republicans of splitting liberal constituencies: black versus white, old versus young, uneducated versus educated. And it puts Democratic leaders such as Barack Obama in an impossible bind, forcing them to alienate key constituencies no matter what they decide. Does anyone really think that Obama coming out in favor of same-sex marriage is going to help him win Indiana or North Carolina — or the key states of Ohio, Florida, or Virginia — in the 2012 election?

If you were a soulless, shameless Republican, wouldn’t you be tempted to take advantage of this?

And, of course, this wouldn’t be the first time that the Republican Party has “gone there.” The Southern Strategy is the term used to describe the tactics employed by that party in the decades after African Americans were granted their civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. The whole point was to subtly exploit racial resentments in the South, driving racist “Dixiecrats” into the waiting, welcoming arms of the Republican Party.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*gger, n*gger, n*gger,’” said Republican strategist Lee Atwater — the mentor of Karl Rove — in 1981. “By 1968 you can't say ‘n*gger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff.”

Fifty years after first employing this strategy, the Republican Party may have finally “southern strategized” itself right into irrelevancy; the party is now wildly popular among formerly Democratic southern whites — McCain won them by an astounding 38 points — but is despised pretty much everywhere else.

But could there be a new Republican strategy: an anti-gay one?

Obviously, I’m not hoping they do this, but I think it’s inevitable. In fact, for at least the next decade, I think the Republican Party will be defined by their opposition to same-sex marriage and other GLBT rights, much the same way the party, which had plenty of pro-choice members in the 1970s, became defined by the “pro-life” position in the 1980s.

All these Republican pundits that are currently saying the party must moderate its stand on social issues? At least when it comes to GLBT issues, they'll be ignored.

Just as with the Southern Strategy, the Republicans will be completely disingenuous on the issue. Witness Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s repeated insistence on The View that gay couples already have "all" the same rights as heterosexual couples, that this is just an argument over the word “marriage.”

It makes GLBT people sound so silly, so unreasonable, even if what she’s saying is completely, 100% false; only a handful of states offer any form of civil union whatsoever, so only a small percentage of same-sex couples in the U.S. have even a fraction of marriage rights. And thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act, no American same-sex couple anywhere has any federal marriage rights or benefits — not even in states such as California and Massachusetts where same-sex marriage was or is legal on the state level.

Still, expect more such underhandedness. Remember in the 1990s how the civil rights protections in employment and accommodation were framed by the Republican Party, infuriatingly, as a battle for “special rights?” The argument over same-sex marriage will inevitably be framed by the Republicans as a question of “religious freedom” — though, of course, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give religions the right to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us (just the opposite, in fact).

And this doesn’t even touch upon the more egregious falsehoods we’ll continue to hear about imprisoning anti-gay preachers, or forcing kindergarteners to learn about gay sex, etc., etc.

Next Page! Will the "Gay Strategy" work for the Republicans? And what can we do about it?