LGBT News Virginia Republican backs gay marriage rights

It certainly is surprising to hear a Virginia Republican endorse marriage equality, especially one who represents the conservative southwestern part of the state like Giles County. (Although his district apparently also includes the liberal college town of Radford and the relatively moderate Montgomery County, which is split fairly evenly between liberals and conservatives)

But this guy Joe Yost is only 27-years-old, he himself cites the "generational gap" when it comes to gay rights, and that might explain his own position. Polls have found that even young Republicans support gay rights, including marriage equality.

 

There is a moderate Republican movement going on. Being "Republican" doesn't mean subscribing to a binary political viewpoint.

 

I think its a bit the same here in australia - a lot of younger conservative politicians are much more supportive of gay rights than the older ones, which can only be a good thing.

 

Is there any way we can test he's a bona fida Republican and not an infiltrator from the Democrats?

 

Not sure if you are being serious or not, but if he were a secret Dem, expressing liberal views would still not get him very popular with dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

Nevermind that though, I'm glad he's for it of course. The antiquated dogmas are being chipped away, slowly but surely.

 

Not really true at all. There is no "moderate Republican movement going on", and being a Republican increasingly means subscribing to an uncompromising, far-right, anti-gay ideology. The GOP has been purging moderates for decades, all the people who used to be "moderate Republicans" are now either independents or are registered Democrats.

What there IS is a far-right Republican "get RID of all moderates" movement going on, but with all the moderates already gone, now they have set their sights on targeting and taking out even level-minded conservatives who aren't batshit crazy enough to please the Tea Party.

It's fine for some local Republican state delegate like the young man in the OP, who represents a liberal city, to express his views in favor of marriage equality. But if he were to ever run for a higher office, like senator or governor, I guarantee that the Tea Party would primary his ass as a sodomite-loving "RINO".

There's a reason why even the so-called "moderate" Republican Chris Christie fought tooth-and-nail against marriage equality in New Jersey at a time when 64% of New Jersey already supported marriage equality (not to mention it being the morally correct thing to do). Supporting gay rights in any way is a surefire way to anger the Republican Party base, that's why the Republican primary audience at a GOP presidential debate actually booed a gay soldier who fought in Iraq who appeared to ask a question about DADT. Bashing homos is a great way to drum up support among the Republican Party's base.

 

That's not really true, although there are some moderates still left.

 

That's not really true either. The people who used to be "moderate Republicans" are now mostly independents or Democrats. Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama govern like Rockefeller Republicans. They have more in common with people like Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford than do modern Republicans.

What today passes for a "moderate Republican" is a conservative who's not completely batshit crazy, a conservative who isn't willing to shut down the government and threaten the full faith and credit of the United States and crash the world economy by allowing the nation to default on its debt just to score political points. That's not "moderate", that's just not being totally insane.

 

I'm gonna make a weird analogy and say that if the political spectrum was measured like the Kinsey scale, zero being far right and six being far left, this guy could be a one or two, going on nothing more than this issue. In response to the argument of spectrum versus binary going on in these comments here. Um... this was one damn impulsive comment.

 

Well I heard a today that there was going to be a state senate primary in Maryland (Right across the Potomac) between a transgender candidate and an openly gay candidate. Maybe some of that acceptance needs to go over to Virginia.

Glad to see a republican back SSM. Now if only the old dinosaurs running the GOP would get voted out or leave, we'd have both parties in support of gay rights. Still would probably never vote for a GOP candidate ever, unless they really (and I mean really) stretch across party lines.

 

There are still neoconservatives like John McCain in Congress. They're a little more moderate on domestic policy, but have some bat shit foreign policy views. Obviously, what constitutes as "moderate" has changed for Republicans, but there are still some Republican MC's willing to compromise.

Clinton was definitely a neoliberal, and there are some similarities to neoliberalism and traditional conservatism in terms of economic views. Obama isn't as liberal as some believe either.

 

They're not even moderate though, really says something when people who were considered far right a few years ago are considered moderates now. Barack Obama is a moderate Republican, more or less.

 

Is he just doing it for votes ?

 

John McCain is exactly the sort of right-winger I was thinking of when describing what constitutes a "moderate Republican" in today's parlance. If McCain were elected president, we'd probably be in World War III right now. But because McCain knows how the game of politics is actually played, and is willing to engage in compromise and deal-making- something all politicians used to know they had to do- that's enough to get him classified as a "moderate" in the climate of today's fanatical Tea Party GOP.

 

Jeb Bush is another more moderate Republican, although I'm not too familiar with his foreign policy views.

If they're anything like his brother's, there's no way I could support him in 2016.

 

The reason a lot of the right wing doesn't support SSM?
Three words: The Religious Right.
Do not tar the name of all conservatives with the likes of idiots such as Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh. Nobody likes those guys. Nobody.
What the extremists in the religious right do not comprehend is that the Bible does not actually condemn homosexuality, and that if they claim to be Christian but haven't read the Bible (I'm an atheist, and I've read a fair chunk so far), they should read it because it is actually quite interesting.

Kasey's right. Yes, there are moderate Republicans. I'll give you that the numbers are smaller than they used to be, but the GOP has a lot of people with different goals. Thankfully, the morons who seem to think gay people are going to "BURN IN HELL!!!1" are becoming a smaller and smaller minority. Besides, the extremist left isn't a picnic, either- it's the extremist right, but left.

Where am I going with this, you say?
I'm saying that the Republican party is really not as bad as people think- and I'm sure the more anti-LGBT members will understand with time. However, since many of the current members are old people, they might be stuck in their ways. The old days never had any obesity epidemics, but, at the same time, a lot of people didn't have rights. That's why many old people disagree with gay rights. They were taught gay = mental disorder!

Since this guy is still in his 20s, he was not raised with that belief, so he's more apt to be in favor for us, since the LGBT community, while colorful, is really a benign and neutral force.

 

Sorry but you're just plain wrong on all these points.

Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh are both incredibly popular figures within the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh's hatefest talk radio show is the most popular talk radio show in America. In fact many people would consider Rush Limbaugh to be pretty much the de facto leader of the Republican Party, wielding far more power over the GOP party base than the RNC establishment which has been pretending to "reboot" the party with outreach to women and Hispanics (although even the RNC is still staunchly anti-gay, since LGBTQs are far too small of a minority for them to care about appealing to us).

In the 2012 GOP primaries, Rick Santorum was seemingly a bottom-tier candidate, a social conservative whackjob best known for comparing homosexuality to "man-on-dog", an extremist who had lost his last election in a landslide, being unseated as an incumbent U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania by a 58-41 margin, the worst defeat ever for an incumbent senator. (And a big part of the reason was that Rick Santorum had for years disguised himself as a moderate, and only when social issues, especially gay issues, became an issue in the 2000s did he expose himself as a bigot far out-of-touch with liberal Pennsylvania.)

Rick Santorum was a loser of a man who had for years been reduced to a punchline, "Santorum" having been popularly redefined to mean "the brown frothy mixture that results from anal sex".

And yet Santorum, who had no money and was originally polling in the single-digits, managed to score an upset win in the Iowa Republican caucuses. Then he went 3 for 3 in the next series of Republican primaries, winning Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri. Despite being massively outspent by the money machine that was Mitt Romney, Santorum continued to rack up GOP primary wins, in Alabama, in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Louisiana, in Oklahoma, in Kansas, in North Dakota.

Mitt Romney, who had pledged to support a federal constitutional amendment banning all same-sex marriages in every state and repealing every gay rights law in the nation, was considered too "moderate" and "RINO" for the GOP. The Republican Party base WANTED Rick Santorum as the GOP nominee.

Only by bombarding Rick Santorum's shoestring campaign into the ground with tens of millions of dollars in state after state was far-right Republican Mitt Romney able to eke out a win over even further-right wacko Rick Santorum.

Rick Santorum IS the face of the modern GOP electorate. So is Rush Limbaugh. Old white bigots who hate gays. Claiming that "nobody" likes them is pure fantasy.

And no, there are no moderate Republicans left in offices of authority. There may be ordinary people who are moderates who may still be registered Republican (but probably don't vote Republican anymore), there may be local state or city-level Republican politicians in liberal areas who are moderate, but the national GOP at this point has been completely purged of moderates. There really are no moderate Republicans serving as governors or senators from any state.

(Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is technically a Republican Senator who supports same-sex marriage, but the only reason she is still in office is because she was re-elected as an independent in a write-in campaign after the Republican Party primaried her in favor of far-right Tea Party lunatic Joe Miller. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois supports same-sex marriage because he needed to do so in order to appeal to a very liberal state if he wants to win re-election, but is still otherwise right-wing (and the Tea Party still has plans to primary him). Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio of course now supports same-sex marriage for primarily selfish reasons because his own son came out to him as gay, but is otherwise a solidly conservative senator (although the socon wackos, particularly NOM, still plan to primary him). Those 3 senators are the only Republican governors/senators to support marriage equality out of 45 Republican senators and 29 Republican governors.)

There was no moderate Republican running for president in any recent election, you'd probably have to go back to George H. W. Bush in 1988/1992, maybe Bob Dole in 1996 although even if moderates themselves both Bush Sr. and Dole were still totally beholden to the right-wing factions in their party. I'd say you'd have go to back all the way to Gerald Ford in 1976 to find a genuinely moderate Republican president/presidential candidate.

And there sure as hell isn't any moderate Republican in serious contention for the presidential election in 2016.

 

Eh, Pennsylvania is not liberal per se.

Though no Republican presidential candidate has won the state in over 20 years, the legislature is controlled by Republicans, we've got a Republican governor (who's quite unpopular right now). A big chunk of the state outside of Philly, Pittsburgh, and Erie is very conservative.

Also, Mitt Romney's record - not rhetoric - was relatively moderate, too. Of course he shifted far to the right during primaries; that's what candidates do, especially when trying to beat an extreme whacko like Santorum.

 

I've heard Central Pennsylvania referred to as Pennsyltucky.