Now you can tell Andrew Sullivan’s really off the reservation:
The fact is: the GOP is using an attack on members of their own families to get a few votes in rural parts of swing states. They’ve used race in the past to achieve this kind of effect. Now gays are the new blacks.
And then:
Yes: but it has long been a tactic of those who oppose civil rights to argue that they don’t. Those opposed to education integration denied that they were against black civil rights — they just wanted separate but equal education for both blacks and whites. Those who opposed inter-racial marriage said exactly the same thing — since blacks and whites were equally constrained by the anti-miscegenation laws, there was no discrimination, etc. It wasn’t that Bull Connor opposed civil rights. It’s just that he had a different conception of civil rights than his opponents!
The Republican Party really is a fairly big tent in a lot of respects, but you’re certainly not allowed to state that the GOP has been known to win elections by pandering to racism, hint that Saint Barry’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act might have been anything other than a pure case of constitutional scruples, or acknowledge that present-day cultural conservatism is the lineal descendent of the Dixiecrat apartheid politics of yesteryear. That’d be like admitting that the New Deal was largely misguided regulatory schemes . . . well, I won’t say it.