Modern-day conservatism cannot survive a head-on collision with empathy, at least when the empathy is for a close loved one. That is really the only way to explain Senator Rob Portman’s (R-OH) about-face on same-sex marriage.

To be clear, I’m very glad that he has seen the light, so to speak. I also have no doubt that he will face severe backlash from his party’s “base,” who don’t seem to like any policy that expresses any sort of kindness towards people they dislike. So he went out on a limb here, and his specific reasons are perhaps not as important as the fact that he did it. I am less interested in why someone comes to the right conclusion as I am in supporting the fact that they got there. The reasons become important, however, when you consider how a change in tune will affect their positions on related issues. In this case, Senator Portman pretty much flat-out said that his mind was changed gradually after his son came out as gay in 2011. I assume he will continue to be a Republican darling on issues that do not affect his loved ones.

I don’t much feel like quoting from the senator’s self-serving justification for his flip-flop in the Columbus Dispatch, so I’ll quote Sylvia Nightshade, writing about it in Daily Kos:

[H]e never considered how the issue of gay marriage affects people until it affected him.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s come over to our side (we have cookies!), but this reveals exactly why Republican politicians suck.  They don’t think about things from other people’s perspective.  They don’t have to struggle to eat, so they don’t think about what happens when they cut food stamps and people who already have too little to eat have even less.  They have retirement savings and won’t have to depend on Social Security, so they don’t think about how gutting SS effects people who depend on it to survive.  They can afford their own healthcare without any problem, so this big scary Obamacare mandate is all bad news, it can’t possibly help people who have no insurance now and just pray they don’t get sick or injured, because it doesn’t help them.  They just end up paying extra taxes for people who are lazy, right?  Because how else would you end up in a situation like that, unless you were lazy?  Because Republican politicians aren’t lazy, and they’re all well-off, so the opposite must be true–if you’re lazy you fail at life.  Thus if you’ve failed, it’s your own fault, so why should anybody else help you?  Help yourself, damnit!

Leaving aside the misuse of the word “effect,” she raises many excellent points. Much of the ideology of the modern-day Republican party derives from a near-total failure (dare I say refusal?) to understand the actual lived experiences of the people affected by their policies. Perhaps the most obvious example from the past year would be Rush Limbaugh’s treatment of Sandra Fluke, who offered expressly non-sexual reasons for women to use contraception. Limbaugh, either because he is cognitively incapable of understanding that she was not talking about sex, or because he knows that his fan base won’t care that he was wrong, ignored all of the actual words that came out of her mouth and called her a slut. Repeatedly.

Same-sex couples want to get married? Well, they are sexual deviants, conservatives know, despite the fact that they want to get married and raise families.

Meanwhile, individual Republicans declare their support for policies deemed anathema to conservatism once it affects them or a family member directly. See Dick Cheney on same-sex marriage, Nancy Reagan on stem-cell research. Compare Nancy Reagan’s position on that issue to that of Rush Limbaugh.

It is tiresome to argue these points, because the only surefire way to make the point clear, apparently, is to put the effects of their policies directly in front of their faces, where it affects someone who actually matters to them.

UPDATE (04/18/2013): Peter Miller at Vice has a good piece on this phenomenon, “Republicans Don’t Have a Ton of Empathy for Strangers.” The whole thing is worth a read, but this jumped out at me:

I’m not saying that Republicans are monsters. I’m not even saying they don’t care about other people’s kids. They probably don’t, but that’s beside the point. The point is, right-wingers of all stripes, from the feisty libertarian to the noble Santorumite, are incapable of learning from the experiences of others. They just can’t help it.

He goes on to list examples, but this really captures the phenomenon for me.

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