Social conservatives Mike Huckabee,
Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer are threatening to leave the Republican
Party if it softens its stance against gay marriage.
After the Republican National Committee
(RNC) released a
report which called for less vocal opposition to gay rights,
several conservatives reacted angrily.
“The vast majority of the GOP base
believes that marriage is a non-negotiable plank of the national
platform,” said
Perkins, president of the Christian conservative Family Research
Council (FRC). “If the RNC abandons marriage, evangelicals will
either sit the elections out completely, or move to create a third
party. Either option puts Republicans on the path to a permanent
minority.”
In an interview with Newsmax,
Huckabee, a former GOP candidate for president, said the GOP risks
alienating its base over the issue.
“They might. And if they do, they're
going to lose a large part of their base because evangelicals will
take a walk,” he said. “And it's not because there's an
anti-homosexual mood, and nobody's homophobic that I know of, but
many of us, and I would consider myself included, base our standards
not on the latest Washington Post poll, but on an objective
standard, not a subjective standard.”
Speaking Tuesday at the National
Organization for Marriage's (NOM) rally on the Nation Mall calling on
the Supreme Court to uphold two laws, Proposition 8 and the Defense
of Marriage Act (DOMA), which exclude gay couples from marriage or
from receiving the benefits of marriage, Bauer, who headed the FRC
for a decade, threatened to leave the party if it “bailed” on the
issue.
“I'm a Republican,” Bauer
told the crowd. “Let me say to my party: If you bail out on
this issue, I will leave the party and I will take as many people as
I possibly can.” (The video is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)