James Kirchik, writing for The New Majority, has a new piece on why the GOP needs to give up its neverending fight against those scary gays:

[T]he continued propagation of policies opposed to the advancement of the gay rights agenda will doom the GOP for a generation. Given the fact that nearly 40 states have passed laws in some way or another defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the notion that conservatives should drop gay issues may seem counterintuitive. But these successes are illusory. America has witnessed a sea change in attitudes on the subject of homosexuality over the past 35 years. In 1973, for instance, 73% of Americans viewed same-sex relations as “always wrong.” In 2006, that figure stood at 56%. In February of 2004, 61% of Americans supported banning gay marriage; two years later that figure dropped to just 51%. Likewise, support for the right of gays to serve openly in the military now stands at nearly 80% (a majority of Americans opposed open service when it first became a national controversy in the early months of the first Clinton administration), and about half of Americans support allowing gays to adopt children…

Conservatives face a stark choice. They can succumb to the short-term temptation of erstwhile electoral victory and continue to support regressive policies on gay rights that are fast going out of fashion. Or they can look at the statistics, talk to their younger colleagues, coolly survey the direction in which the culture is inevitably headed, and plan accordingly. This doesn’t necessarily require the GOP to support gay marriage, just to stand out of the way of what’s coming. A properly conservative party does not just wish to preserve the useful traditions of the past, but to adapt those traditions for the future.

1. It’s the right thing to do. People are perfectly welcome to hate gay people (or blacks, Jews, or left-handed people) in their private lives. However, when it comes to the public sphere, too much of the Republican anti-gay agenda has served to demonize gay people in a truly despicable way.

2. Simply from the point of self-interest, the Republican Party would be better served by dropping the gay hate. With every passing year, the hatred and stigma of gay people lessens. In the “conservative” Tory Party in England, there are already a number of gay elected officials serving openly without much of a clamor from the party faithful. Could you imagine such a state of affairs in today’s Republican Party?