McCain Marches Against The Course Of History

Even as McCain shills for the people who trashed him in '80, and participates in efforts to expand government and deny liberty, Salon takes a look at how uninteresting the Anti-Gay Movement is to Republican voters. Serves the craven fool right:

Marilyn Musgrave is, surprisingly, tacking in a different direction. She no longer wants to talk in public about the "radical homosexual agenda" and its malicious impact on the American family. "I am running on a platform of security. Economic security. Border security. National security," the corn-husk blond Republican announced at the start of a candidate debate last week in Windsor.

This is a dramatic departure from the Musgrave of old, the Pentecostal mother of four who came to politics in 1990 as a school committee member determined to stamp out sex education. As a state legislator in Colorado, she campaigned constantly against gay marriage and attempted to deny benefits to the same-sex partners of state employees. In Congress, she has twice served as the chief sponsor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. "As we face the issues we're facing today, I don't think there is anything more important than the marriage issue," she announced, just six weeks ago, at a Washington conference for values voters. "If we have gay marriage, our religious liberties are gone."

But in her home district, despite its conservative pedigree, a call to arms in the culture war no longer plays the way it once did. In recent weeks, she has backtracked on her Washington comments, saying they were taken out of context. At the same time, Musgrave's Democratic opponent, Angie Paccione, has gone on the offensive, despite polls that suggest about 60 percent of the district supports a constitutional ban on gay marriage. "Marilyn Musgrave is out of touch," Paccione says in a recent television advertisement: "She said that her gay-marriage agenda is the most important issue facing the United States of America … Are you kidding me?"

The rest here.