Protesters

In this Saturday, March 28, 2015 file photo, thousands of opponents of Indiana Senate Bill 101, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, gather for a protest on the lawn of the Indiana State House. The revised Indiana law signed by Gov. Mike Pence on Thursday, April 2, 2015 prohibits service providers from using the law as a legal defense for refusing to provide goods, services, facilities or accommodations. It also bars discrimination based on race, color, religion, ancestry, age, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or U.S. military service.

(Doug McSchooler Associated Press)

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signs a reworked religious freedom bill into law after it passed in the House at the Arkansas state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Thursday, April 2, 2015. Lawmakers in Arkansas and Indiana passed legislation Thursday that they hoped would quiet the national uproar over new religious objections laws that opponents say are designed to offer a legal defense for anti-gay discrimination.

The firestorm of controversy that raged this week in response to religious-objections bills in Indiana and Arkansas has once again exposed a major divide within the Republican Party.

State laws seen as discriminatory against gay couples laid bare and intensified longtime divisions in the party between social conservatives opposed to gay rights and the pro-business wing of the party that sees economic peril in the fight, The New York Times reported.

"This is a pro-business party with a gay exception, and that exception comes into play over and over again," Charles Francis told The New York Times. Francis was a founder of the Republican Unity Coalition during the George W. Bush administration, which failed in its effort to eliminate sexual orientation issues from the party's agenda.

Following a backlash of criticism, Republican governors Mike Pence in Indiana and Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas signed revised versions of their states' Religious Freedom Restoration bills Thursday night. In Indiana the language was adjusted, and in Arkansas it was significantly scaled back to more closely align with the federal law, NPR News reported.

The divisions within the GOP were on particular display Wednesday in Little Rock, Ark., where Hutchinson called on state lawmakers to either recall or amend legislation billed as a religious freedom measure, so that it mirrored a federal law approved in 1993, The New York Times reported.

Hutchinson said he understood the divide in Arkansas and across the nation over the question of same-sex marriage and its impact on people's religious beliefs. His own son, Seth, he said, had asked him to veto the bill, which critics say could allow individuals and businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians, The New York Times.

"This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial," Hutchinson told The New York Times. "But these are not ordinary times."

Though 19 other states and the federal government have laws similar to Indiana's, the timing of that state's religious freedom act has propelled the issue to national prominence, The Los Angeles Times reported. When Bill Clinton signed a less expansive law two decades ago, gay marriage was not legal anywhere. President Obama ran as a gay marriage opponent in 2008, before shifting his support in 2012. Now, the Democratic Party is almost uniformly in favor, but many Republicans still forcefully oppose it, because of religious beliefs or a quest for political advantage.

Establishment Republicans had hoped to shift the party's emphasis away from social issues, while conservative Republicans who still hold seats in state Legislatures fuel much of the party's energy as the next presidential election nears, The Los Angeles Times reported.

NPR News speculated the Republicans' big electoral victories in November blinded them to just how controversial this legislation would be. Hutchison and Pence both seemed genuinely taken aback by the demand for boycotts and the backlash from big corporations like Eli Lilly, Walmart and Apple, as well as the NCAA, NPR reported.

Because of redistricting and the phenomenon of a midterm electorate that leans a lot more Republican than a presidential-year electorate, there are now many more GOP governors and many more conservative majorities in state legislatures, NPR News reported. And those majorities are moving forward with an agenda that satisfies their base of social conservatives but is seen as intolerant and divisive by the business community and a growing majority of voters in the country. This week, those two opposing dynamics reignited the culture war, with Republican politicians as the first casualties.

Part of the problem for Republicans is a majority in their party disagrees with most other Americans on the issue of how to balance the rights of same-sex couples and business owners who might object to their marriages, The Los Angeles Times reported.

In a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center from September of 2014, Americans were closely divided on the question of whether business owners should be allowed to refuse to serve same-sex couples because of a religious objection, with 49 percent saying they should be required to serve all customers and 47 percent saying they should be given a religious exemption, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Among self-identified Republicans, there was lopsided support for a religious exemption, 68 percent to 28 percent. Americans older than 65 supported a religious exemption, 60 percent to 36 percent, and those younger than 30 opposed it, 62 percent to 35 percent, The Los Angeles Times reported.

"Equal treatment for gays is really not a left-wing issue anymore, certainly not for our students, and we have a very conservative student body," Gerald Wright, a political scientist at Indiana University, told The Los Angeles Times.

A new Pew Research poll showed that 61 percent of young Republicans favor gay marriage, NPR News reported.

The Republicans can't appeal to young voters if they're on the wrong side of gay marriage, because gay rights is a symbol of tolerance for so many young voters -- not to mention suburban women. The same is true for one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate -- Hispanics, NPR News reported, adding the views of the GOP's white, older, conservative primary electorate are farther away from the center of American public opinion than the Democratic base is right now.

"There has always been this tension," Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, said to The New York Times, "both in terms of tactics, because the economic conservatives wanted to talk about taxes and the economy, and on the electoral strategy," because those social issues often alienated suburban moderates and cost Republicans elections, he said.

"There is no doubt that the continued opposition of gay rights is an electoral loser," he added. "Younger Republicans are as pro-life as older Republicans, but gay rights is a huge generational shift and Republicans are going to have to find a way to deal with that issue."

Greg Sargent of The Washington Post wrote in an opinion piece the Republican National Committee has acknowledged the party is at risk due to a generational split on gay rights, finding this passage in the RNC's analysis of what went wrong in the 2012 national election:

For the GOP to appeal to younger voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view. Already, there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays -- and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.

Indiana's controversial religious freedom law recently forced some in the Republican Party, including large corporate leaders, to denounce discrimination against gays and lesbians, Mark Naymik of the Northeast Ohio Media Group reported. This is exactly the message these conservatives want their party to embrace in the party's platform, which is formally adopted every four years during the presidential nominating convention, Naymik reported.

The young conservatives are networking now, trying to influence the party insiders who will ultimately control the platform committee with this three-pronged pitch, as Naymik reported:

* To remain politically relevant (and win nationally), the party must recognize the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage outside and inside their own party.

* The party isn't compromising by supporting same-sex marriage because freedom to marry is about autonomy and liberty, the party's core principles.

* The party is more accepting and inclusive than the current platform reflects.

"It's the right thing to do, and it's the right thing to do politically," Nina Verghese, a former deputy regional political director at the Republican National Committee, told Naymik.

All the leading Republican presidential hopefuls came out in favor of the Arkansas and Indiana bills. By Wednesday, though, Jeb Bush was backtracking, insisting religious freedom is a core value but we also shouldn't discriminate based on sexual orientation, NPR News reported.

"By the end of the week, I think Indiana will be in the right place, which is to say that we need in a big, diverse country like America; we need to have space for people to act on their conscience; that it is a constitutional right that religious freedom is a core value of our country," Bush said, as The New York Times reported.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, has no doubts about what side he's on, NPR News reported. In Iowa on Wednesday, Cruz blasted the "big business" wing of the GOP, saying they are "running shamelessly to endorse the radical, gay marriage agenda over religious liberty."

"Religious liberty is not some cockamamie new theory that the Indiana legislature just figured out yesterday," Cruz said in Sioux City, Iowa, as The New York Times reported. "It was literally among the founding principles of our nation, and we have to be able to explain that cheerfully and with a smile."

Whit Ayres, a prominent Republican pollster and strategist who is advising Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, told reporters Tuesday it was urgent the party figure out how to deal with gay rights, as their acceptance becomes more widespread, The Los Angeles Times reported.

"This is where we're headed as a country," he said Tuesday, as The Los Angeles Times reported, "to the point where a political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay -- at the presidential level -- will never connect with people under 30 years old."

In another sign of the divisions, 11 Senate Republicans voted last week to assure the approval of a budget amendment providing Social Security and veterans benefits to gay couples. Many others, especially U.S. Senate candidates up for re-election in swing states, are siding with groups that want to extend rights to gay couples, The New York Times reported.

"Life comes down to who you love and who loves you back, and government has no place in the middle," Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, one of the 11 Republicans to vote for the budget amendment, told The New York Times.

Kirk was the lead Republican sponsor of an employment Non-Discrimination Act, which passed the Senate in the 113th Congress. Others who voted for the measure were Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Rob Portman of Ohio, Republicans who are expected to face tough re-election fights next year, The New York Times reported.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest business organization, also signaled its opposition. "The U.S. Chamber doesn't condone discrimination of any kind, in any form," the group said in a statement, as The New York Times reported.

Francis, a management consultant who dropped his Republican affiliation after the battles in 2006 over the marriage issue and married a man, told The New York Times, "I think the jury is still out on whether the Republican Party will be able to resolve this chasm before the coming generation of millennials are completely gone."