Republican presidential contenders are conceding defeat on gay marriage.
The GOP field of announced and presumed 2016 candidates remains unanimously opposed to same-sex marriage. But in interviews and public comments, their approach quietly departs from the party’s longstanding position that government-sanctioned marriage, and corresponding benefits, should be reserved for traditional unions of one man and one woman.
Perhaps to avoid disappointing social conservatives with their decision to relinquish the fight, which opinion polls suggest they are losing, or perhaps in reaction to a Supreme Court case that could legalize same-sex marriage across the land, Republicans are reframing their position on marriage as constitutional rather than moral. That’s a far cry from where the GOP stood just four years ago.
“I believe that the people in the states who have voted on the issue, we should respect their wishes, that’s the reason that we have state governments, not just a central government,” said Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, 63, among the most outspoken opponents of same-sex marriage in the field, when asked recently if same-sex marriage should be allowed to stand in states that have legalized it through the democratic process.
And, it’s not just Republican candidates, who might or might not be paying attention to surveys that show growing acceptance and support for same-sex marriage across most demographics. Republican voters, too, are softening demands for federal action to block the redefinition of marriage. Instead, they’re asking lawmakers and GOP presidential hopefuls to protect their right to maintain traditional marriage as the only government-sanctioned union in their states.
“As far as the same-sex issue, or the marriage thing, I think it’s up to the states and individual people,” said Allen Cuthrell, 56, an electrical engineer and Republican voter from Anderson, a city of 30,000 in the socially-conservative Upstate region of South Carolina.
The Democratic Party’s broad embrace of federally recognized same-sex unions puts that party far ahead of the GOP’s evolution on this issue, although some individual Republican elected officials are supportive of gay unions.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton begins the 2016 contest in favor same sex marriage, after having been opposed when she ran for president in 2008. Still, the Republican position has shifted significantly since 2004. Then, President George W. Bush won re-election on a platform that included support for amending the Constitution to preserve traditional marriage as the only union sanctioned by the government.
Even as recently as four years ago, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in the midst of his first run for president (he’s running again in 2016), had to backtrack after initially citing the Tenth Amendment as his reasoning for being okay with the state of New York legalizing same-sex marriage. Perry, a traditional marriage purist, had angered social conservative activists. This time around, no less than Sen. Ted Cruz has said that his position is grounded in the Constitution.
The Texas Republican announced his presidential bid on the campus of Liberty University, an evangelical Christian college in Lynchburg, Va., with a direct appeal to social conservatives on issues like religious freedom and traditional marriage. But in an interview with radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt a few weeks later, Cruz, 44, indicated that as president, he wouldn’t try to throw out same-sex marriage in states that have legalized it on their own.
“I’m a constitutionalist. And under the Constitution, from the beginning of this country, marriage has been a question for the states. It has been a question for elected legislatures in each of the 50 states,” Cruz said. “And what we’ve seen in recent years from the left is the federal government and unelected federal judges imposing their own policy preferences to tear down the marriage laws of the states.”
“If someone is running for public office,” Cruz added, “it is perfectly legitimate to ask them their views on whether they’re willing to defend the Constitution, which leaves marriage to the states, or whether they want to impose their own extreme policy views like so many on the left are doing, like Barack Obama does, like Hillary Clinton does. That’s what we would be doing.”
Over the past 20 years, Americans’ opinions of same-sex marriage have nearly reversed themselves.
According to Gallup, only 27 percent thought same-sex unions should be “valid” when the issue was surveyed in March of 1996, with 68 percent saying they should not be valid and 5 percent expressing no opinion. In May of 2014, support for same sex marriages as valid had risen to 55 percent, with opposition dropping to 42 percent and no opinion sliding to 3 percent.
In the latest Reuters Ipsos poll, meanwhile, Democrats, who generally support same-sex marriage, held a 22 percentage point advantage over Republicans on the question of which party had a better plan or approach to “gay marriage.” It appears as though many Republicans appear resigned to the new political reality of where Americans are on this issue.
“I’m for marriage defined as between a man and a woman. If the Supreme Court changes that, those changes have to be respected,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who could enter the race for the Republican presidential nomination this summer, said recently during a luncheon with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
Disclosure: The author’s wife works as an advisor to Scott Walker.
