When the House of Representatives voted to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy several years ago, I watched with rising horror as a map on my screen showed nearly every Republican member voting against allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. armed forces.

This was my party. I’ve voted Republican my whole life, volunteered for Republican candidates, joined Republican groups. Yet of 173 voting Republicans, only five—about 3 percent—supported overturning a policy that discriminates against people like me.


I knew, of course, that my party was behind the time on gay rights, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. The question that ran through my mind that day was one I’ve often had to answer since: How could I be a Republican?

I asked that question again this week as I watched the Cheney family tear itself apart. That Liz, who’s running for a Senate seat in Wyoming, broke with her sister, Mary, rather than face accusations of being secretly in favor gay rights was frankly revolting.

I was glad to see Mary fire back on Facebook: “Liz—this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree, you’re just wrong—and on the wrong side of history.” And Mary’s right. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I’m not worried about my party. The kind of infighting we saw this week will only get louder, and it will threaten to consume the GOP. But in the end our side will win. The Republican Party will change its stance on gay marriage—and sooner than most people realize.

The Republican Party is on a collision course with an electorate that is rapidly shifting on gay rights, and while the GOP’s anti-gay stance may not have hurt it in 2012, it could destroy the party in 2016 or 2020. At the same time, the gay rights movement needs the backing of Republicans now more than ever after its string of historic victories in deep blue states. Why? Because it’s the only way to win marriage equality in more conservative parts of the country.

Both sides need to face the same realization: There may not be many of us yet, but Republicans who support gay rights are both the future of the GOP and the future of the LGBT movement.

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It’s not easy to be hated by your own party—never mind by your fellow gay-rights supporters. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who was for a long time the most prominent gay elected official in the country, has called us gay Republicans “ Uncle Toms,” and the writer and advocate Dan Savage deemed us “ house faggots.” Although nearly 1.5 million of us—about a quarter of all gay and lesbian voters—chose Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, one writer for the Advocate compared being gay and Republican to being African-American and supporting the Ku Klux Klan.

I once went on a first date that seemed to be going well until the conversation turned to politics. I mentioned that I was a libertarian who supported Republicans, and a shadow crossed his face. I had seen it before. “How can you possibly be a Republican?” he asked.

I tried to explain, but he quickly made an excuse and left.

How can I be a Republican? The glib answer is: “Not easily.” The longer answer is that the Republican Party needs people who favor gay marriage (only a quarter of Republicans do, compared to about 70 percent of Democrats). Otherwise, it will continue down a path of political oblivion and moral bankruptcy.

Gay Republicans understand the contradictions. We tend to be libertarian-leaning, uncomfortable with government intrusion of any sort, whether in our bedrooms, pocketbooks, churches or businesses. We don’t trust social conservatism, nor do we believe liberalism is its antidote. The history of the government’s suppression of gays has taught us that the state should stay out of the morality business.

Many gay-rights supporters cheered a few months back when the New Mexico Supreme Court upheld legal sanctions against a photographer who declined to work at a same-sex wedding. On a personal level, I found the photographer’s position anathema, but from a legal perspective I agreed with the many right-of-center gay-rights supporters who were deeply uncomfortable with the government’s position. What is this fight about, after all? For liberals and conservatives, it comes down to imposing one or another set of diametrically opposed moralities on the other side.

That, in short, is why I’ll never be a liberal.

This summer, a friend and I started a blog called The Purple Elephant, in part to advocate for progress within the GOP, but also to chronicle the changes we believe are inevitable as the political landscape shifts around our party. We expect there’ll be a lot to cover.

Currently, only five of 279 Republicans in Congress support same-sex marriage—less than 2 percent. If the GOP continues along its current path, it’s in for some bad news. Long gone are the days, in the 1990s and 2000s, when anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives drove large numbers of social conservatives to the polls. In 2004, Republicans operatives like Karl Rove pushed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in Ohio as a means of driving Evangelical turnout; in 2013 that same Karl Rove, no dummy, is tacking hard to the center, even stating that he could imagine the 2016 Republican nominee backing same-sex marriage.

To this point, stats-guru Nate Silver created a useful model, predicting opinion on same-sex marriage state by state and year by year. In 2012, Silver pegged national support for gay marriage at 48.3 percent , but he expects it to rise to 54.4 percent in 2016 and a stunning 60.5 percent in 2020. By 2016, according to Silver, a majority of the population in almost every swing state will support marriage equality. Compare that to 2008, when just 42 percent of the country favored same-sex marriage, and nearly every swing state was dominated opponents.

Within the Democratic Party, we’re seeing a swift domino effect on gay rights. Just a few years ago, only a handful of Democratic senators backed marriage equality; now 51 support it. The changes in the GOP have been far less dramatic, but it’s pretty noteworthy that three Republicans are now on board with same-sex marriage—this despite the fact that each faced severe and credible primary threats after making the announcement. Scores of prominent Republicans signed on to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting same-sex marriage in advance of last year’s decision by the court allowing gay marriages to stand, and suddenly Republicans—at least those in purple and blue states—are trumpeting their support for the issue.

Gay marriage is still a wedge issue—it’s just that in much of the country, the wedge is now cutting a different way.

To some on the left, it already appears as though the fight for marriage equality has been won.

I recently spoke to a woman—a smart lawyer from Washington, D.C.—who did a double take when I told her I had started a blog covering the gay-rights movement within the Republican Party. “Isn’t that issue over?” she asked. “Don’t almost all states have gay marriage by now?”

Well, no.

Just because we know what the outcome will be doesn’t mean we’re there yet. Ask same-sex couples in the 37 states that still won’t recognize their marriages. It’s not that gay marriage has won—it’s that it will win. Future tense. In 2014, the battle ground will shift to states like Oregon and Indiana, which will have same-sex marriage ballot initiatives.

The gay rights establishment has begun to embrace Republicans willing to buck their party on same-sex marriage. A Republican who favors marriage equality is much more valuable than a Democrat who does. Republican support sends an important message to other conservatives across the country: It is not electoral suicide to support same-sex marriage.

Not surprisingly, anti-gay groups are trying to collect the heads of as many pro-equality Republicans as possible, and that’s part of the reason the party is stuck in slow motion. The top anti-gay marriage political group, National Organization for Marriage (NOM), for instance, recently endorsed the primary opponent of Carl DeMaio, a gay Republican who’s running for Congress in San Diego. “There's another thing about DeMaio's candidacy that you should know,” NOM’s president and co-founder Brian Brown wrote. “He's an open homosexual and an avowed supporter of the gay movement. ...The reason his homosexuality is an issue in this race is because this is precisely why GOP leaders in Washington are backing him.” (Emphasis in the original.)

No matter how implausible, Brown claims the Republican leadership in Congress—all of whom, by the way, are on the record opposing same-sex marriage—is pushing a gay candidate because he’s gay. In reality, they’re probably backing DeMaio simply because he can win. Still, there’s something to Brown’s argument: The most far-sighted GOP leaders are beginning to realize the party has to start pivoting away from the vicious anti-gay sentiments of the past.

You can see this shift even among social conservatives. Jim DeMint—the former South Carolina senator who’s now president of the Heritage Foundation—once argued that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to teach in public schools. But you sure don’t hear that anymore. The best he can muster now is that opponents of gay marriage aren’t bigots and that he’s “grateful we live in a country where people can love who they want and live the way they want.”

Even Brown, in his openly gay-bashing message about DeMaio, felt the need to add that DeMaio has the “right to live as he chooses.” That’s not what social conservatives were saying a decade ago, when they were outraged after the Supreme Court overturned laws prohibiting gay sex. Back then, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson was arguing that gays posed a danger to children, and evangelical leader Pat Robertson was calling gays “ self-absorbed hedonists” who “want to impose their particular sexuality on the rest of America.”

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It’s perhaps too easy to blame the grasstops of the GOP—the Jim DeMints, the Karl Roves—who have kept on cynically gay-bashing as long as it worked. But ultimately what politicians care about most is keeping their jobs—that is, winning elections. So the only way Republican pols can sell anti-gay rhetoric is if Republican voters are buying it. And now, finally, the voters, even Republican ones, are changing. How long will it take for them to start dragging the party along with them?

The best way to convince politicians is to point to the politics. In the Virginia governor’s election, extreme social conservative Ken Cuccinelli lost a campaign dominated by (accurate) attacks on his extreme social views. (NOM had endorsed Cuccinelli, saying, essentially, that it doesn’t matter that he was going to lose so long as he would stand on principle. Good luck selling that in D.C.)

In this year’s other gubernatorial election, Chris Christie provided a model for socially inclusive Republicans who want to slowly but surely move to the center on gay rights. Christie supports civil unions, and he signed a bill banning gay conversion therapy—which purports to “cure” homosexuality—for minors. But he still opposes same-sex marriage. And yet, after the state supreme court refused to stay a lower court ruling that granted marriage equality, Christie made the smart decision to drop the appeal, realizing it was a sure loser.

Social conservatives were outraged. NOM said Christie had “abandoned his principles” and called his decision a “surrender.” Maybe so. But Christie—a likely GOP frontrunner in 2016­— won his election by more than 20 points.

Of course, both elections turned on more than a single issue. But both have real implications for the future. The question for 2014 and 2016 is whether Republicans want to follow the path taken by Cuccinelli in Virginia or by Christie in New Jersey.

***

Several months after I watched one Republican congressman after another vote against the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell,” the Senate took up the issue. Eight Republicans supported repeal—20 percent of the voting Republican senators. It was not exactly sweeping change, but it was progress. Another sign of change came last month, when 10 GOP senators voted for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

I remember reading about the lead up to the Senate vote on “don’t ask don’t tell” during my lunch break one afternoon. I was a middle school teacher at the time, and as my students walked in from lunch—talkative, rowdy, oblivious to what Don’t Ask Don’t Tell even was—I thought of the generation they were a part of. I was sure then and am sure now that their generation will tolerate gays and lesbians, but at that moment there was a more pressing question on my mind: Will their generation tolerate Republicans?

Matt Barnum lives in Brooklyn and works at an education nonprofit. He is co-founder of the blog The Purple Elephant and is a member of the leadership committee of Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry.