This article on college-age Republicans has some encouraging news. The younger generation appears to be open-minded about gay marriage; they think interracial marriage is a positive development; they either support abortion rights or they just aren’t interested in discussing them; and some of them are even doing outreach to the Muslim and Latino communities. It would be wonderful if we could stop fighting about those things some time in the not-too-distant future. However, this next part kind of annoyed me.
Zoey Kotzambasis, vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Arizona, considers herself a conservative. But she supports both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Those are not just her opinions.
“A lot of the College Republicans I know share the same liberal-to-moderate social views,” she added. “And I think that’s changing the face of the party.”
I don’t want to pick on Ms. Kotzambasis, but we are not seeing ANY evidence of this change in the Republican Party. In fact, we are seeing a very strong trend in precisely the opposite direction. The Guttmacher Institute tracks state and federal legislation pertaining to reproductive rights. Here are their findings for 2012:
To date, legislators have introduced 944 provisions related to reproductive health and rights in 45 of the 46 legislatures that have convened this year. (Legislatures in Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas do not meet in 2012.) Fully half of these provisions would restrict abortion.
So far this year, 76 abortion restrictions have been approved by at least one legislative chamber, and nine have been enacted. This is below the record-breaking pace of 2011, when 127 abortion restrictions had been approved by at least one body, and 38 had been enacted by this time last year. However, the overall level of legislative activity is nonetheless significantly higher than usual for an election year: In 2010, for example, only 46 such restrictions had passed at least one house by this point, while in 2008, only 34 had passed one chamber by the end of the first quarter. (The number of enacted abortion restrictions totaled 19 at this point in 2010, but in 2008, none of the enacted bills restricted access to abortion.)
Needless to say, with perhaps a single handful of exceptions, all of those efforts to undermine women’s reproductive rights have been initiated and primarily supported by members of the Republican Party. The last two years have been unprecedented. And if you support women’s rights and women’s health, this anti-woman trend should not be ignored. Maybe you think that lower taxes for rich people are more important than funding for women’s health centers, but that just seems stupid to me.
If you’re a young Republican who doesn’t hate gays, isn’t terrified of Muslims and Mexicans, doesn’t want to restrict abortion access, and doesn’t support disenfranchising blacks, then you must be attracted to the party for strictly economic reasons. But that’s a whole lot of hate and intolerance you have to overlook just to get a few less regulations and a lower marginal tax rate for people making over a quarter million dollars a year. The young folks will change the face of the GOP for the better eventually, but it hasn’t happened yet. In fact, the modern GOP is so radically opposed to the values of young people that it is surprising that any college-age folks can support them.
Young Republicans are a bunch of Mitt Romneys.
Just trying to white-wash republicanism. It’s the flip-sides of the “both sides do it” lie.
Wasn’t Romney a (relative) liberal once? The trouble with young liberal Republicans is that they become old conservative Republicans when they start working for their paymasters.
He spoke like a relative liberal when he was running for office in Massachusetts.
Was that the real Mitt Romney, or is this year’s version the real Mitt Romney? Is there a real Mitt Romney?
Who knows?
I ahave a brother-in-law in his late 60’s who likes to call himself socially moderate to liberal and economically conservative. I still don’t know what the hell that means as Republicans have shown themselves to be the least fiscally responsible people in the country for the last 40 years.
All that means is that he considers all those people impacted by the policies of the more radical Republicans of less importance than having a deficit or paying less in taxes.
They say these things to assuage their guilt, and internally deny their complicity in what happens.
That whole “socially liberal/economically conservative” nonsense has driven me nuts for years. If “economically conservative” means “I don’t want to pay taxes for anything I don’t personally and immediately benefit from,” then the extent of social liberalism you can entertain is not freaking out over other people’s lives and choices. It does not and cannot include what I and most progressive consider the moral underpinning of social liberalism: That we all are part of, and responsible for, a larger community, the wellbeing of which is worth contributing to.
A libertarian is a conservative who smokes pot.
But never pays for it.
Nah, it’s still culture. And you know it.
Young liberals are such a bore. Each campus Democrat group is a mini-Oberlin filled with a bunch of drum circle, repression olympics, fair trade, “Don’t you care about Darfur?!” social science majors. They’re (usually) right, but they suck.
Half the Republican-leaning college graduates under the age of 40 (the ones that aren’t self-loathing closet cases or fundies) got that way because the scarf-wearing hippie chicks thought they were total squares back in the day. It all starts with that persecution complex. It’s why they hate that awful “librul media” too.
They just sound like Libertarians to me. I wonder how many of them support Ron Paul?
while college republicans may not hate gays, muslims, mexicans, etc, it’s a pretty safe bet since they’re gop that those kids don’t care about them one way or the other. they may not protest against gays, muslims, mexicans, etc, but they won’t promote them either. their selling point seems to be: “all that icky grown-up hate-stuff? ignore it. and join us anyway!” i’m sure they’d prefer gays, muslims, mexicans, etc, just quietly disappear altogether.
look at what it took to put marriage equality on the democratic platform: positive work by dedicated activists. this stuff doesn’t work by osmosis.
That is unless your parents are making over a quarter of a million dollars a year. Then it’s just smart business sense.
In fact every one of those college kids in this article sounds like a Glibertarian Randroid trust fund asshole, or wants to be one so badly they’re willing to throw the rest of us under the bus to get there.
Fuck these kids.