TPM:

Paul devoted almost none of his speech Wednesday at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., to explaining the GOP’s thorny relationship with black voters over the last fifty years, and most of it arguing that “the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.” His history lecture focused almost entirely on the period before 1964, when the GOP began to champion the states rights arguments of southern whites. Echoing apopular conservative talking point, Paul repeatedly reminded the audience that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws in the south and that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as were the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP.

The talking point here is popular, however, it’s asinine as well. Somewhere along the line, Republicans who like to use it to excuse nearly a half-century of “benign neglect” of these issues forgot that it was a silly little propaganda line and started to think that it was actually something they could use to win arguments and persuade people. Michael Steele built his black outreach program around it. Bruce Bartlett even wrote a book about it, and he’s not an idiot! This is a problem because it isn’t very persuasive, especially not to present-day black people who are engaged enough in civic life to know what’s what, but it’s also dubious to anyone with a sense of history. Yes, Lincoln was a Republican, and so was Grant. Both had pretty good records on this stuff. Then came about six decades of mostly GOP governance in which nothing was done. And nothing much was done during the New Deal/Eisenhower era either. There is something of a myth that the GOP was pro-civil rights during this era, but it wasn’t really the case. Some individuals and groups were–the great Earl Warren, some Senators like Jake Javits and Margaret Chase Smith, and actually a fair number of Eisenhower staffers like Sherman Adams, Ike’s Chief of Staff, and Attorney General Herb Brownell, who together pushed Eisenhower to get serious about the issue despite his palpable lack of enthusiasm toward it. For the most part, though, Republicans of the time represented Midwest and Interior West states that had few black people in them, didn’t care much about the issue, and didn’t want to jeopardize their alliance with Southern Democrats over it. See Caro’s third LBJ book for more on this. Eventually, Republicans came around for political reasons, when they realized that Adlai Stevenson’s ties to Southern Democrats eroded black support for Democrats and saw an in to grabbing that support. Richard Nixon’s support for civil rights was entirely opportunistic, and it was discarded once going the other way was better politics. In any event, Warren, Javits, Smith, Adams, Brownell and all the rest of them were all stereotypical RINOs who would have been drummed out of the party sometime in the 1990s if they were our contemporaries.

Anyway, you know all this. But every once in a while someone talks about how Republicans will eventually flip on marriage equality and start to talk about gay rights as if they’ve always been for them, which doesn’t quite seem right to me. Republicans have, at various points, strongly supported civil rights as a party. Those points have happened to come at high points for the popularity of civil rights as an issue, so to the average person who is disposed to vote Republican, that record seems just about right–doing the important things, while avoiding the “excesses” like affirmative action and reparations and so on. This is why they’re able to get away with it. But Republicans have never been in favor of gay rights. There’s no real ambiguity there. The only thing I can possibly think of is that Reagan opposed the ballot proposition to forbid LGBT from becoming schoolteachers in 1978, but that’s awful thin, and Reagan’s own record is hardly positive in this area. You can’t posit Reagan as a hero of gay rights with that whole “not doing anything about AIDS” record. I guess you can add in Barry Goldwater’s support for LGBT to serve in the military, but Jesse Helms more than compensates for that. There’s no counternarrative to build here, really, and although there is some chunk of the GOP that supports civil marriage, the average person who is disposed to vote for the GOP thinks the party’s record on this stuff is just about right. That is, that full-scale opposition to marriage equality is the right thing in their opinion. The fact is that nearly all Senate Republicans voted for the 1964 CRA, and nearly all Senate Republicans voted for a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2004. People who came of age during these times will always have “antigay” as a first impression of the GOP, and it will actually take hard work to reverse that.