Evangelicals and social conservatives are drawn to hate like a moth to a flame...

[napoleon_in_rags]

7. I personally am not.

Their base really has two parts, the fundamentalist/social conservatives, who are more numerous, and the business class executive types, who are WAY more secular. The latter are really very effective and smart, but they have a different philosophy about smarts than us: Dems believe in a well informed populous who should be self governing, so we shout out what we think from the rooftops, but they believe that things should be run by smaller groups of "specialists", which is them, and as a result tend to conceal their thoughts, or rather trade them as a commodity in more closed groups, while presenting a public demeanor they think would be appropriate for "common" people, like a PR thing.

So the result is you don't really see the division publicly because you don't see the thoughts of the business class Repubs, but the division is there. The good news for gays is that I really don't think the business class Republicans are inclined to fight this.

I think what happened is this: The economy isn't picking up as fast as everybody wants, and its hurting at the polls. Obama saw a win-win, he could either accomplish a civil rights objective, or get the Republicans turning away from the core issues everybody cares about to start obsessing about gay people. The bad news is that they didn't and won't take the bait, at least at the level of central leadership. (We'll see if their punditry takes up the slack.) But the good news is for gays: America is realizing in tough times it doesn't have the time to obsess on what they are doing with their lives. And that is a step forward.