HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
THE PINK ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
tion, and Jerry Fallwell’s Moral
Majority, and this cohort used its
influence among evangelical voters and funders to pressure major
Republican candidates into adopting conservative social positions.
As the Republican party drifted
further to the right, and the Democratic party gradually embraced a
gay rights agenda, Log Cabin continued to insist on working with
conservative leaders, with mixed
results. They believed it would
only be a matter of time before
they could have the best of both
worlds — a party that embraced
gay rights and minimal taxation.
Richard Tafel, the first president of
Log Cabin, pointed to the fact that
Republicans didn’t widely excoriate
the President for supporting samesex marriage. “That’s an amazing
development as well,” he said.
Recently, Log Cabin has helped
deliver key votes in state battles
over marriage rights — most significantly in New Hampshire and
New York — and they filed a lawsuit that played a critical role in
tearing down Don’t Ask Don’t
Tell. But they have hardly freed
the Republican party from the
influence of social conservatives,
and both GOProud and many gay
activists on the left see this as evi-
dence of their irrelevance.
Last year, before accepting his
party’s nomination for president,
Mitt Romney pledged to ban gay
marriage. A few months later,
President Obama became the first
president in history to openly
back it. Many people feel that the
line between the Republican and
Democratic candidates has never
been so visible.
In 2008, neither Obama nor
Senator McCain endorsed samesex marriage, but over the past
several years, the President has, in
his words, “evolved.” In 2009, he
passed the hate crime law that protects gays, and in 2011, he repealed
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and declared
that his Justice Department would
no longer defend the government
from an onslaught of lawsuits challenging the Defense of Marriage
Act, or DOMA, the 1996 bill, signed
by Clinton, in which marriage is defined as the “legal union of one man
and one woman.” In May, Obama
and Vice President Joe Biden both
announced that they personally
supported same-sex marriage.
At this year’s convention, for
the first time ever, the Democratic
Party adopted a platform setting
forth the goal of supporting “marriage equality” and “the move-