Why Conservatives on Quora Claimed to Never Oppose Same-Sex Marriage

To be fair, Democrats were also against the idea of same-sex marriage a few decades ago, including Joe Biden, the current president. So, it wasn't just conservatives at that time.

Historical Context of the GOP

Reversing the timeline a bit, the GOP was for a very long time a chamber-of-commerce party. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as good at national economics as it fancied itself, so it brought on and messed up the response to the Great Depression and spent 40 years in the wilderness from the 1930s through the 1960s. It clawed its way back to relevance by hoovering up white supremacists who abandoned the Democrats in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era and also by forging/co-opting a unified religious right, mostly evangelicals but also the more conservative of the Catholics that the GOP had long despised.

Broad Categories of GOP Voters

So, it has a large group who hates LGBT people with a passion and would happily have them locked up, and another large group of people who just want tax cuts and have no particularly strong opinions about LGBT issues. Overlap continuum, blah blah blah. The tax-cut conservatives will find some excuse or other to appease the homophobic conservatives and the white supremacists because they won’t win elections and get their tax cuts otherwise but they very much do not want to think or have it pointed out that that they’ve made their bed with bigots.

There are fine people on both sides, they would insist, echoing Trump’s language when a neo-Nazi ran down a bunch of counter-protesters at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Public Opinion on LGBT Issues

And whereas the religious right somehow managed to freeze public opinion on abortion in stone, they lost abjectly on LGBT issues. So, in the aftermath of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision of 2015, a lot of conservatives went strangely quiet on LGBT issues or even insisted in defiance of all history and logic that conservatism had always supported LGBT people if not for conservatives battling evil Democrats like Bill Clinton of Don’t ask, don’t tell fame LGBT people would have had their rights sooner.

But there's only so much of that that you can do because the bottom line remains that nobody gets their tax cuts without appeasing the religious conservatives. So, it coexists uneasily with a renewed campaign of hate towards transgender people for existing and a renewed campaign of hate against LGB people for supposedly grooming them.

Conclusion

In summary, the inconsistencies in the positions of conservatives on Quora about same-sex marriage can be attributed to historical shifts, political pragmatism, and the strategic necessity to appease the religious right. Understanding this context can help us navigate the complex landscape of political and social debates today.