The dog catches the car. The cat eats the canary. And Republicans who supported their Party’s position denying LGBTQ rights and reproductive care now believe that they have caused a massive backlash against their conservative positions by quietly sitting by while radicals determined the Party’s policies.
As the Washington Post reports, the few rational Republicans left in the Party are now decrying the long-time GOP positions and rhetoric demonizing members of the LGBTQ community and people who seek abortion services. Speaking out after the horse has left the barn, these Republicans feel that the Party is now perceived as too hateful and out-of-the-mainstream to reflect their views.
After a radicalized Supreme Court completely overturned Roe–a court decision that legalized abortion nationally and was tremendously supported by the public–rank and file Republicans found themselves having to defend politicians nationwide calling for the prosecution of rape and incest victims as well as pregnant persons who would die from severe complications. And while there are significant numbers of Republicans who support the right to get an abortion, they were never accepted or put forward as candidates in the vast majority of jurisdictions in Red states.
“Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb,” suspected child sex trafficker and Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz told a crowd of self-proclaimed young conservatives at a grooming conference last week, illustrating the hate and disdain for people that characterizes the GOP nationally. Gaetz, who faces accusations that he and a Republican buddy of his frequently hired underage sex workers and transported them across state lines, called abortion rights advocates “disgusting” and “odious on the inside and out.”
That hate carries over to the Party’s treatment of LGBTQ people, who have been accused by the people who are now mainstream Republicans as being perverts who are using the everything from books to public schools to television shows like “Sesame Street” to “turn” children gay.
Criminalizing people who are seeking vital medical treatment and people for whom they love are unpopular with voters, but are culture war issues mainstream Republicans created and now use to fire up the GOP base. That doesn’t sit well with the remaining rational Republicans.
“I feel we’re on this sort of seesaw where one party sort of gets the upper hand on social-cultural issues, then they overplay that hand,” said Christine Matthews, a moderate Virginia Republican and longtime strategist for GOP candidates. “Republicans have taken things too far.”
“Every village has an idiot, and we have several villages,” said one prominent GOP strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid. The strategist added, “I don’t think there’s probably anything said before Oct. 15 that’s going to stick around till Election Day. And it’s got to be said by a high-enough profile [figure].”