Social conservatives say gay marriage is the issue the GOP elite would like to discard.. | REUTERS Social conservatives fight back

The preferred plot line for many in the GOP establishment for revitalizing their party goes something like this: They move to a more libertarian stance on key social issues — particularly same-sex marriage — and the Bible-thumping, evangelical wing of the party meekly complies, realizing times have changed.

One problem with that scenario, however: The Christian Right, while a diminished force, doesn’t like how that story ends at all.


Leading cultural conservatives, including the movement’s standard-bearers from the past two presidential campaigns, have had it with Republican elites faulting them for the party’s losses and are finally ready point a finger back at the establishment.

“Look, the Republican Party isn’t going to change,” former Sen. Rick Santorum said in an interview. “If we do change, we’ll be the Whig Party.”

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Santorum continued: “We’re not the Libertarian Party, we’re the Republican Party.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who carried the Christian conservative torch in 2008, pointed to the drop-off in enthusiasm among Republicans following George W. Bush’s victories.

“The last two presidential elections, we had more moderate candidates, so if anything a lot of conservatives went to the polls reluctantly or just didn’t go at all,” said Huckabee in a separate interview. “If all of the evangelicals had showed up, it may have made a difference.”

Huckabee and Santorum are reacting to the conventional wisdom that has swept through much of the Republican political class since the party’s latest presidential thumping last November: We’re getting our hats handed to us because young voters, minorities and women are turned off by our social stances and rhetoric.

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To reach these increasingly crucial voters, this explanation continues, we must moderate on tone and perhaps even substance when it comes to issues like gay marriage and abortion.

The argument began immediately after the election but has intensified in the wake of the Republican National Committee’s scathing self-review and as the Supreme Court has heard the legal challenge to restrictions on same-sex marriage. It has been articulated by both the usual mix of donors and operatives, and by the emerging libertarian wing of the GOP represented by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Yet during this season of Republican soul-searching, comparatively little has been heard from the party’s social conservatives. It has been the would-be reformers — citing gay marriage, politically damaging comments on abortion and the need for immigration reform — who have dominated the discussion. Given the makeup of the modern Republican coalition, the social conservatives’ relative absence has been striking.

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For decades, the Christian conservative bloc has represented, alongside the business community, one of the GOP’s twin pillars. With changing demographics, ever greater distance from the 1960s backlash and the Obama-era focus on fiscal issues rather than the traditional culture wars, however, the voice of social conservatives seems to have become more muted.

Yet as some party intellectuals openly wonder if the heyday of the religious right has come and gone, social conservatives are responding with ferocity, indicting John McCain and Mitt Romney for their losses and bluntly warning that the GOP will cease to exist if the party abandons those voters who are in the party because of, not despite, its platform on values. If cultural conservatives are headed toward extinction, they are making clear they won’t go away without a fight.

For example, Santorum complained, in the past election the GOP would have been better off focusing more — not less — on the very issues the establishment wants to downplay.

“If we had candidates in the last two presidential elections who weren’t ashamed of the positions they had on these issues and played offense, instead of listening to the same people who now want to abandon the issues, we would’ve been successful,” said the 2012 GOP runner-up. “And then after they lose, they go and blame social conservatives when the only folks talking about those issues were on the other side!”

Huckabee, like Santorum, was a bit incredulous at the attempt to fault social conservatives when the party nominated two individuals who largely shunned talk of culture in the general election and were uncomfortable when they had to discuss issues like abortion.

“Nobody would say that these were guys that just light ’em up at the National Right to Life Convention,” cracked Huckabee.

To GOP establishment types, such talk is evidence that the party isn’t ready for reform just yet and, in historical terms, is more likely to reprise the Democrats of 1972 than the Democrats of 1992. That is, the GOP will lose with a version of unapologetic, George McGovern-style purity rather than win with a move to a Bill Clinton-esque brand of reform.

“You win in politics by broadening your appeal, not narrowing it to white guys over 60,” said longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy, who supports same-sex marriage rights. “And gay marriage is becoming a litmus test issue for voters under 35.”

Each side says with a sigh and an eye roll that the other is rolling out the same tired argument.

The social conservatives suggest gay marriage now has become what abortion was for so many years — the issue that Republican elites weren’t comfortable with and would like to discard.

“We’ve been hearing the same old song for 30 years,” said Ralph Reed, who helped put the Christian Coalition on the map. “The names, faces and issue may have changed, but you can go back in Lexis-Nexis and pull any number of different people making the same arguments.”

The movement types say simply changing positions on the marriage issue won’t come without a cost: Elements of the GOP base simply won’t show up to vote.

“If the party elites think we can win by getting across the idea that we’re no different on values issues, they are really clueless to the fact that they’re going to lose voters that they only get because of those issues,” said social conservative leader Gary Bauer, who ran for president in 2000.

Lisa Van Riper, the head of South Carolina Citizens for Life, pledged to find another political home if the GOP moves left on culture.

“I know what I’ll do — I’ll go vote for somebody else,” said Van Riper. “I vote on issues, I don’t align on party.”

To the likes of Murphy and other reformers, though, the we’ll-stay-at-home threat is as stale and empty as the plea for social moderation is to the Christian conservatives. After all, liberals dismayed by Clinton’s moves to the center and right ultimately swallowed hard and supported him, at least most of the time.

“Will some drop out? Maybe,” said Murphy. “But will most of those who agree with us on economic issues stay with us? I think so.”

The moderates believe it’s mostly a bluff and that the calls for a louder version of purity are as delusional as those of 1980s liberals who contended that they could start winning again simply by turning out more out of the faithful.

Yet the cultural right makes the case that, unlike in the ’80s, polls show the country today remains broadly sympathetic to conservatism.

“If you look at every survey, conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1,” said Santorum.

Ken Mehlman, the onetime RNC chairman who is leading his party’s push on same-sex marriage, becomes frustrated over what he sees as a false choice: that the GOP must either abandon many of its core voters or press on with the same undiluted gospel.

“We want the party’s faithful and their kids to vote for us,” said Mehlman in an interview.

To Mehlman, who came out as gay in 2010, expanding a conservative practice like marriage and welcoming immigrants is hardly incongruous with traditional values and is emphatically good politics.

“No smart political party, no successful company says lets be satisfied with yesterday’s customers,” he said. “They say how do we anticipate the needs of tomorrow’s customers consistent with who we are.”

“The key to a principled party succeeding in a changing electorate is to identify core principles that will appeal to rising and new voting groups,” Mehlman continued. “And the reason that more than 60 percent of evangelical millennial voters support marriage for same-sex couples and the reason many conservative politicians from Jeb Bush to George W. Bush have been able to win substantial support in the Hispanic community is because there’s a strong conservative case, indeed a family values case, for more people who want to join the institution of marriage and who want to come here to work, support their families and live the American Dream.”

Both reformers and traditionalists conveniently ignore or downplay elements that cloud their arguments.

Social conservatives are particularly — and understandably — bothered that the elites rarely want to discuss the elephant in the room: that the party’s economic policies don’t necessarily appeal to the the rank and file, who vote Republican because it is the party of traditional values.

“If we gave our voters an accurate portrayal of our ideas, that we want to cut the rate of growth on Social Security, give tax cuts to billionaires and then the values issues, the values issues would be more popular than the economic agenda of the current Republican Party,” said Bauer, citing particularly those Mass-attending Roman Catholics who have fled the Democrats.

Bauer added, “I would caution the donor wing of the Republican Party that is driving a lot of this: If they think social conservatives are the only thing preventing Republicans from winning, they’ll learn that their economic agenda will go down the tubes along with the Republican Party’s prospects.”

This argument has also been picked up some of the conservative pundit class following the RNC report, which urged support for comprehensive immigration reform and more tolerance on gay rights but glossed over Romney’s glaring weaknesses on issues like taxes and health care.

“If you believe that Mitt Romney’s economic platform and ‘you built that’ rhetoric would be the basis for a durable majority if they weren’t associated with the religious right and anti-immigration sentiment, then this is the vision of Republican reform for you,” wrote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat after the party’s self-diagnosis was released last month, predicting that “jettisoning cultural conservatives in order to protect an unpopular economic agenda” would consign “GOP elites to exactly the kind of purer-but-smaller, permanent-minority fate that their revolt is intended to escape.”

Huckabee observed that social conservatives are already tired of the lip service from party leaders on cultural issues.

“People are just sick of it,” he said. “They’re treated like a cheap date — always good for the last-minute prom date, never good enough to marry.”

But, the reformers note, abortion and same-sex marriage are separate issues, and while opposition to abortion remains as strong as ever on the right, views toward marriage are changing among Republicans, particularly those younger than 40.

“There is no demographic that is immune to the trend lines on marriage over the last nine years,” said Alex Lundry, a data guru who works with Mehlman. Lundry said that while support for same-sex marriage still lags in the GOP compared to the broader population, support is increasing among self-described evangelicals, conservatives and Republicans.

Oran Smith, head of the conservative Palmetto Family Council in South Carolina, predicted that the short-term fix for the party’s disputes on issues such as marriage would be to defer to the states.

“I see the party in general embracing a federalism approach on a variety of issues,” said Smith, adding that he “can see marriage and abortion diverging because the party seems more pro-life than ever.”

The divergence is on vivid display: More and more states are passing strict abortion restrictions even as attitudes rapidly change on marriage.

But that doesn’t mean social conservatives are resigned to defeat on gay marriage.

“There is a split,” said Santorum, on the views of younger Republicans on gay marriage and abortion. “But the marriage issue is still a very new issue in America, and people said in the 1970s it was just a matter of time before everybody became pro-choice. So, I think we’ll see the pendulum swing back once young conservatives see the real consequences to the destruction of marriage.”