Have times changed enough for American voters to elect a gay president? From climate change to immigration, this country has huge issues to resolve; the sexual preference of a president should be immaterial

Bill Leonard | The Des Moines Register

A book published 60 years ago provides an interesting indication of changing American attitudes.

"Advise and Consent," by New York Times reporter Allen Drury, offered an insightful look at the U.S. Senate and won a Pulitzer for fiction. The plot involves a senator who, rather than face exposure of a years-earlier homosexual contact, kills himself.

Today, it's difficult to accept the likelihood that such "shame" would provoke a suicide. The change has been gradual, but steady.

Now young Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind., is a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. In Drury's day there were many terms, mostly derogatory slang, used to describe homosexuals; "gay" was not among them. Has public acceptance of homosexuality in the ensuing three generations undergone a similar degree of change?

Twenty-four years ago, the issue caused some turmoil in Des Moines when the schools' policy on dealing with sexual deviance came under fire. In a crowded meeting hall, school board member Jonathan Wilson took the microphone to confirm the authenticity of rumors that he was gay.

The following year he was up for re-election, after having won four terms. His opponents had the endorsement of all Republican presidential candidates who were in Iowa campaigning for the caucuses.

The 1996 school-board election drew 30,000 voters — five times as many as usual. Wilson won 12,000, but "lost by a landslide," in his words.

The next Iowa storm over the issue came in 2009 with the Iowa Supreme Court's 7-0 ruling on same-sex marriage. The following year, the three justices up for yes-or-no retention were tossed off the court by a 55-percent majority. In the years since, voters have retained other justices involved in the ruling.

Fifteen years ago a national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed 31 percent support for gay marriage; this year's poll showed 61 percent approval. Another poll this year showed 46 percent of Republicans are open to electing a gay president.

Barack Obama proved in 2008 and 2012 that race prejudice, while far from erased, need no longer exclude people of color in national elections; the popular vote in 2016, and the growing number of women in politics, showed a similar decline in gender prejudice. But the issue is far from resolved.

The upcoming Iowa Democratic caucuses will measure the feelings of the current minority political party of one small state. Caucus-goers' opinions regarding Buttigieg's gay status may be a major factor or next-to-no-factor at all.

But the possibilities pose a real concern for Democrats — who may differ as to whether being gay will help or hurt the candidate, but who seem to agree that for the coming 2020 national showdown, picking someone on the basis of his or her chance of winning is far more important than choosing on the basis of any single or any combination of political issues.

There are huge matters to be resolved during the coming presidential term. These include climate change, expanding Medicare, financing higher education, immigration, federal minimum wage, crumbling infrastructure, and more. By comparison, the sexual preference of the chief executive should surely be immaterial.

But "should" and "should not" don't count when the votes are tabulated.

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With painful regularity, we read about the Iowa caucuses "which began in 1972." That's only wrong by a century and a quarter.

The caucuses began with statehood, under a highly different format. Local political leaders, sometimes intent on dictating the choice of state convention delegates with no interference from the voters, decided where and when they would meet depending on how they could best discourage attendance.

Iowa historians have written of instances where the leaders would post a time and place, then meet an hour earlier, finish business in minutes and close down, apologizing for any misunderstanding. In one instance, the leaders set a huge fire in a part of town well away from the caucus site to create a distraction.

Jim Flansburg, the late Register political editor, said that once, a team of leaders, when ordered to post a time and place, wrote notices on paper, went out at midnight and peeled the bark from trees, posted the notices and then replaced the bark to cover them. (Knowing Jim, he just may have made that up.)

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And by the way, outdated or not, "Advise and Consent" is still a helluva read.

Bill Leonard is a retired Register editorial writer.