If The GOP Gives Up Its "Get Off My Lawn" Attitude, Will It Still Be The GOP?

Republican

There's a mirror image in the GOP to the ConservaDems who embrace Choice and equality and other social issues but are nearly as conservative and anti-working family as Republicans. We've talked a lot lately, for example, about gay Democrats who get into Congress and are great on LGBT issues but vote with the GOP on their destructive economic agenda. New Dem freshmen Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Sean Patrick Maloney (NY) are both gay and each has a breathtakingly horrible voting record on issues important to ordinary working families. They're among the most consistent supporters of Boehner and Cantor among House Democrats. Having totally alienated their own electoral bases, both are likely to lose their seats next year.

The national Young Republicans just had a convention. There were no cross burnings and if they were cheering for Steve King's anti-Hispanic jihad, it was behind closed doors. Many in the organization consider themselves Libertarians and eschew the racism, hatred and bigotry that have crowded out the traditional Greed and Selfishness wing of the Republican Party. Many... but not all. CNN spotlighted a confused gay Republican who fled homophobic Alabama for more tolerant New Hampshire, 27 year old Tyler Deaton. He's clearly from the Greed and Selfishness wing-- but he wants the GOP to accept his and his compatriots' homosexuality. Some do; many don't. They may be Young Republicans... but they are still Republicans.

This evening, Deaton is helping host a reception to raise interest in same-sex marriage issues among Young Republicans, who are gathered in Mobile for their national convention. Deaton is campaign manager for the young conservatives' arm of Freedom to Marry, a national gay rights group.

On Deaton's side of the doorway, things are going well. Deaton and his colleagues have collected more than 50 e-mail addresses-- about a sixth of the total number of conventioneers, he says.

Even among the visitors there are those who do not seem completely comfortable; one man, after exclaiming how great the party is and his hopes for more approval of same-sex marriage, declined to give his name and hustled away at the sign of a reporter's notebook.

It hasn't been much different at the convention as a whole. Despite Freedom to Marry statistics that indicate most Republicans under 50 approve of same-sex marriage, the group hit some roadblocks with convention organizers.

Deaton's group wanted a panel discussion of LGBT issues on the official convention agenda. That request was turned down. It wanted to be a sponsor of the convention. That was also rejected. After deciding to have a reception and booking a slot, the scheduling ended up clashing with gatherings of various state groups.

It's OK, says Deaton, neatly dressed in suit and tie, in a voice that hints of his Southern upbringing.

"We're not in this to make enemies or to fight," he said. Progress, he admits, will take time.

It's a lesson he hopes the GOP is learning.

"The GOP has become too much of a club that defines itself by who it's leaving out," he says. "And I think the GOP has to do a better job of defining itself by its ideas, and letting anybody who shares those ideas come in and be a part of it."

The Republican Party is in a race with the future.

Though it holds power in the House of Representatives and a majority of statehouses, its demographics, for now, are going the wrong direction.

The country is becoming more urban and diverse, two details that favor Democrats. In 2012, blacks and Hispanics overwhelmingly went for the president; Obama also got 55% of the women's vote, 60% of voters under 30 and almost 70% of the vote in cities with 500,000 people or more.

Worse than the numbers is the impression they make. In a recent study, another young GOP group, the College Republicans, put it bluntly: the GOP is seen as "closed-minded, racist, rigid, (and) old-fashioned."

The Young Republicans cut a somewhat different figure than today's national GOP. They're not just younger-- members range from college age to 40-- but less doctrinaire as well, preferring to focus on economics and civic involvement.

..."Social issues should not be the main focus over fiscal issues," says Head, nattily dressed for the convention in a seersucker suit and brown-and-white saddle shoes. "We have a debt problem, we have a health care problem whether you agree or disagree with what's coming, and those are things we should focus on."

He sums it up succinctly: "I'm very involved on the fiscal side, and I'm 'get off my lawn' on the social side."

It's a small-government attitude shared by many youthful conservatives, says Arizona State University professor Donald Critchlow, a historian of the conservative movement.

"There's a very, very strong libertarian voice among the young," he says. "They're very liberal-- if you want to use that term-- on social issues: gay rights, abortion, marijuana and war, those kinds of social issues that would put them on the left side of the spectrum. But they're coming from a libertarian perspective."

These are folks who backed Ron Paul for president, or ended up voting for Obama because they disliked the GOP's stand on social issues, he says.

...There was also plenty of classic conservative red meat to be chewed. Of the handful of vendors' tables, one was sponsored by former Sen. Rick Santorum's organization, Patriot Voices. Another featured flyers from the libertarian Cato Institute for an e-book called "Replacing Obamacare." One man hawked copies of his book, A Time to Kill: The Myth of Christian Pacifism.

Large meetings opened with prayers, some of them in Jesus' name, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. In speeches, there were invocations of Obamacare and the 2009 bailouts, pointed mentions of the IRS, the use of "Democrat" (instead of "Democratic") as an adjective, and proud defenses of states' rights and tax cuts.

For many, the convention was also an opportunity to talk about ways of moving the party forward after the losses of the 2012 election campaign.

The lack of diversity was obvious at the convention's general gatherings. The majority of the 300-plus attendees were men; just a handful were Hispanic or African-American.

The YR's outreach committee has been trying to find ways of expanding the tent. At a discussion, the group suggested appealing to minorities by stressing the GOP's economic message of entrepreneurship and fiscal responsibility.

Outgoing YR Chair Lisa Stickan, an attorney and former prosecutor from Cleveland, believes this is a winning strategy.

"I think there's this misconception that younger people are only looking at social issues," Stickan said. "You have a lot of people graduating college who are in serious debt and are having trouble finding a job, and if you asked them about social issues, they would say, 'I'm having trouble surviving here.'"

...Stickan adds, the GOP has to keep up with the times. That means using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to stay in touch with voters. The Democrats have been making good use of online media since at least the Howard Dean days; the Republicans are doing better but need to do more, she says.

"The social media, particularly for some low-information voters or younger voters, is important, just to keep up with the trends," Stickan says... Deaton, the gay Young Republican from New Hampshire, hopes that's true. He wants action, not just talk. The concept some national leaders have pushed-- "better messaging"-- drives him up a wall.

"What they're saying is there's actually nothing wrong with the Republican Party. We just don't talk about it the right way," he says. "But the problem is that some of the beliefs are also wrong. I think Americans are hungry for fiscal conservatism. I think, though, that they want a bit of a more humble foreign policy than what the GOP has been offering for the last decade, and they do want the Republican Party to take a new approach on social issues.

"It doesn't just mean repackaging or putting a new label on it," he says. "You have to change the recipe."

...Many of the Latino Young Republicans -- a small but notable group at the convention -- talk about their membership with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they believe in the party's small-government, faith-and-family principles. On the other, they bristle at some of the anti-immigrant talk within the party.

Texas YR official Chris Carmona made the point explicitly at one breakout session. Thanks to party members' harsh words, Republicans are thought of in the Hispanic community as anti-immigrant, anti-family and anti-religious, he observes. "We have an anti-, anti-, anti- image of everything possible in the Hispanic community."

Texas delegate Artemio Muniz expands on that point. Muniz, a 32-year-old from Houston, is the son of illegal immigrants. His family was on welfare, sold chips at the ballpark and took items from trash bins to sell.

"We started at the bottom," he says. "We know what bootstrapping means." His parents were given amnesty as part of a 1986 immigration reform bill signed by Ronald Reagan.

He grimaces when he thinks about how some Republicans treat Latinos.

"I've been at Tea Party meetings where the lady is saying, 'Let's deport them all,' and the lady that's serving her is an illegal immigrant bringing her nacho chips."