A Republican National Committee (RNC)
investigation into its 2012 electoral defeat calls for less vocal
opposition to gay rights.
The report, released Monday and dubbed
the Growth and Opportunity Project, was commissioned by RNC Chairman
Reince Priebus.
Under a section titled Demographic
Partners, the report calls for outreach to young people who support
gay rights.
“For the GOP to appeal to younger
voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to
make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of
alternative points of view,” the report's authors wrote. “Already,
there is a generational difference within the conservative movement
about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays – and
for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the
Party is a place they want to be.”
“If our Party is not welcoming and
inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue
to tune us out. The Party should be proud of its conservative
principles, but just because someone disagrees with us on 20 percent
of the issues, that does not mean we cannot come together on the rest
of the issues where we do agree.”
The group Young Conservatives for the
Freedom to Marry called the acknowledgment a “first step.”
“I applaud the committee for
producing this report, but this is only a first step,” Tyler
Deaton, campaign manager for Young Conservatives for the Freedom to
Marry, said
in a statement. “The Young Conservatives Leadership Committee
calls on the Growth and Opportunity Project to go further by fully
respecting in word and deed those of us who support the freedom to
marry for all loving and committed couples.”
Tony Perkins, president of the
Christian conservative Family Research Council (FRC), warned that
supporting marriage equality would “place [the] Republican Party on [a]
path to permanent minority.”
“[H]istory – and most statistical
data – shows that young people tend to become more conservative and
more religious as they grow up, get married, and start families of
their own,” argued Perkins, who helped write the Republican
Platform's plank against marriage equality. “[M]eaning that a
hasty retreat on marriage may score cheap points now, but it would
actually alienate the same people later on.”
Writing at ThinkProgress.org,
Josh Israel criticized the RNC's report for leaving out LGBT people.
“Rather than work to appeal to the
five percent of American voters who identify as LGBT – and
preferred the Democratic nominee by a more than three-to-one margin –
the new GOP plan is to stand by its exclusion, but try to sound
inclusive when doing so,” Israel wrote.