He’s right about this. Times have indeed changed:
“Increasingly LGBT people are empowered, not ashamed,” he said. “They’re attacking us, and we’re confronting them. We’re holding them accountable and calling them on their lies and their ‘pious baloney,’ to borrow Newt Gingrich’s phrase. America is waking up to the fact that we’re not bogeymen, and we’re not coming to do any harm, and that we’re your daughters and sons and neighbors, sometimes your parents, your co-workers, friends, colleagues. The Republican party, in this desperate [nod] to its dying evangelical base, is just ramping up the homophobia, and they’re doing themselves real long-term damage.
“What’s interesting is that, you look at who’s been doing the most hate speech: Bachmann? She’s out. Herman Cain? He’s out. Perry? He’s all but out. Santorum? He’s running fourth, he’s trailing even in conservative South Carolina,” Savage continued.
“It’s not winning them the election anymore. It’s not 1992; Pat Buchanan can’t get up and give a ‘gay rights never, family values forever’ speech at the Republican National Convention anymore. Times have changed.”
This is why, though, if we step back from the GOP primaries and look at the state of the whole movement, the Religious Right is becoming more extreme in their rhetoric against LGBT people. They are desperately trying to hold on to the last few clingers, as they’re well aware that the younger generations just aren’t replacing the older generations when it comes to anti-gay bigotry. They won’t admit it, but they know they’ve lost the overall war. In the piece above, we find Dan wondering whether the GOP will ever look the same again, once they truly realize that the bigot thing doesn’t play with the general population anymore. I wonder the same thing, because it’s really not like the current Republican party believes IN anything.
[h/t Joe]
