I’m going to try to be pretty rigorous about posting weekly starting soon, but seeing as I’m in the home stretch of a long semester, I’m not going to try posting any huge data-filled analysis of a story. Instead I’m going to defer to the best thing I’ve read this week, and a few thoughts on the subject. If you haven’t yet, you really need to check out Matthew Yglesias‘s Rob Portman and the Politics of Narcissism over at Slate (Rob Portman is the junior Senator from Ohio, and a Republican).

As a liberal, I think a lot of the moral values that underlie my policy preferences are rooted in empathy. I support a more progressive tax system on the basis that, even if I end up in a high tax bracket, I know that there will still be people struggling who need help, and that outweighs my desire to keep more of my paycheck or not be taxed on capital gains. I support a less interventionist foreign policy because, while I may believe with all my heart that the US might be acting in another country’s best interest, I know that if I were in that country’s shoes that I would want to be the one making that decision, not some foreign superpower. I support a universal healthcare system because, even though I may not be sick, I recognize that we as a country have the capability to help people, and our current failure to do so is unacceptable.

So should Rob Portman’s announcement that he has done a sharp 180 on matters of gay rights should be celebrated? I’d like to make the case that, while yes this one decision was a good one and we should be happy for it, what we should be focusing on is not that he changed his mind on this issue, but all the issues for which he did not change his mind (Matthew Yglesias’s point), and that up until now he hadn’t changed his mind (my point). Rob Portman’s decision was, by his own words, brought about because “something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.” To be clear, Rob Portman was arguing from empathy here; he saw the issue from the opposing position’s side, and based on that and little else he changed his mind. This wasn’t some Senator who caucused with the Republicans but didn’t have much to say about gay rights: he co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, and just back in 2011 his selection as the University of Michigan’s commencement speaker was protested over his “openly hostile” position on gay rights. Yet now, one single event caused him to not only change his personal position, but advocate for others to do the same.

Matthew Yglesias’s (powerful) closing statement pointed out that senators don’t have poor children, and while that’s a very worthwhile takeaway from this story I don’t think that should be your only one. Don’t only consider all the other issues that Rob Portman could conceivably change his mind on in a similar way, think about the fact that Ohio has the 8th largest number of same-sex couple households. Think about the fact that, as of 2005, there were almost 777,000 same-sex couples in Ohio. Think about the fact that, to “consider the issue from another perspective” was enough to change Rob Portman’s mind, yet in his twenty years in politics in Ohio, the opinions of 770,000* fellow Ohioans were not enough to make him do that. Not even once.

*The article I’m getting the 770,000 figure from says 770,000 couples, but I’m treating that as meaning ‘770,000 individuals in a same-sex couple’, not ‘770,000 same-sex couples consisting of 1,540,000 same-sex individuals’, as that would put the same-sex population of Ohio at over 13%, which does not jibe with figures that put the nationwide average at somewhere a little under 5% of the population.

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