Inevitably, the unanimous decision of the Iowa Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage this week will impact the 2012 GOP Presidential race, with Iowa’s caucus being the earliest election involved in the choosing of convention delegates.
It will make the burden of the Republican party ever greater to recover from the debacle they are involved in now. Most likely, GOP candidates will be outdoing each other in being anti gay, in order to gain the backing of the evangelical right.
But at the same time, by catering to this element in their party, the Republican party will alienate many people who are already turned off to the role of evangelicals in the party, and it will likely backfire with the younger generation in particular, which does not want the kind of social intervention in private lives that this group desires.
It will, unfortunately, be sad to see such bigotry and hate being promoted, and remind us of past such bigotry and hatred that was advocated by Southern Democrats on the issue of civil rights for African Americans up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriage in 1967.
It can be hoped that some Republican candidate will emerge who does not wish to promote this agenda. That is the only hope for the near future of the GOP, but right now it is hard to imagine who that courageous candidate might be.