James Richardson, a former spokesman and adviser for the Republican National Committee and Governors Haley Barbour and Jon Huntsman, comes out publicly in the Washington Post, and opines on being gay, Republican, and his desire to marry.
Via The Washington Post:
Throughout my career I’ve publicly advocated for the freedom to marry, urging the party for which I work to allow gay men and women to wed even as I never openly disclosed my personal stake. I’ve preached the small-government virtues of equal marriage, echoing a conservative case that had been made many times before by thinkers more eloquent and far brighter than myself. Never once did I write that I am gay.
For my admission here, I will alienate friends whose faiths regard my sexuality as culturally corrosive. I’ll suffer the snickering of those across the aisle whose politics regard my own as personally injurious. And conservative clients may regard me as a liability. After all, the tide is not as unidirectional as people say.
While the conventional wisdom holds that the public’s dramatic shift was driven primarily by expansive support among millennials, pollsters estimate that one-in-seven equal marriage supporters were once opposed to the convention.
Nearly one-third of these belated boosters say they were won over through personal encounters with gay family members or friends, so the potential reward of convincing even one dubious neighbor is greater than the assumed risk of a diminished social orbit. And it’s okay if I alienate a Facebook friend or two.
