@lasma:
Without getting into the nitty gritty, both parties have had their problems with same sex marriage and challenging the religious. During the 2008 primary, for example,Hillary Clinton said she was proud of DOMA, and were she president, she would have voted for it, and it was outright pandering to the religious right. Other Democrats ran away from the issue as well, for example they refused even a nominal effort at trying to pass ENDA (a national anti discrimination bill covering LGBT people) because 'they didn’t want to offend the religious".
Even within the GOP, the motives varied. Yep, you have the Santorums and the Cruz’s and the rest of the religious wrong, but you also have the money GOP, the libertarian GOP members, who should have been all over the issue (sorry, Rand Paul, you and your father are phony libertarians, no libertarian would ever justify legal discrimination against someone based on religious belief), the moderate GOP members, who ‘didn’t want to offend the base’ (meanwhile, the reality is the GOP base would vote GOP no matter what), so even if they personally were supportive, they were afraid of ‘the base’.
Part of this is the myth that the media portrays, they made it seem since Reagan that the country was dominated by religious conservatives, that conservative Catholics and fundamentalists and such were ‘the majority’, and they aren’t, and if anything the country is shifting and the religious right’s teeth are blunted. While the Democrats gave lip service to LGBT issues and same sex marriage, they also did very little to push it, they were very, very careful. Put it this way, Obama only embraced same sex marriage when polls showed it wouldn’t hurt him to embrace it, and I won’t even mention Hillary, who quite frankly on the issue, is disgustingly self serving.
What will be interesting is how the big money GOP and the libertarian branches are going to handle the issue, because if they nominate someone who makes a big deal of same sex marriage, if the GOP keeps their plank on banning it in the constitution, it is going to kill them. There was an interesting article in the NY Times when same sex marriage was legalized by SCOTUS, that said basically that the issue of opposing same sex marriage had a very high correlative index among those who otherwise might vote GOP, not to do so, and it was mostly the young and independent voters, whom the GOP needs, that responded like this. If they present themselves as the holy halalujah party, it is going to hurt them.
You are right about the opposition, Alito almost came right out and said it in his dissent, he basically said that by making same sex marriage a legal right, it would ‘suppress the voices of those who feel it is a sin’ and such, basically,he was objecting to the fact that socially it will be increasingly frowned upon to say negative things about LGBT people. It is funny how the religious want to reserve the right to call gays what they want, but they don’t do so for other sins, if sloth is a sin, then why don’t they call overweight people fatso? Or call someone who is divorced and remarried an adulterer, or yell at a young couple who live together and call them fornicators? The answer is that they have set aside one class of sin for special treatment, and that has little to do with religious belief, it is they want to be able to denigrate someone and hide behind faith.
A lot of it has to do with people who have very little the cheer about in their lives needing someone to look down upon. Having someone you can look down upon, think of as being less, gives certain types of people a sense of self, and it is sad, whether it is racists or the overtly homophobic. Being anti gay has been one of the last kinds of discrimination that was okay with most people, and the haters fear that,because then who can they look down upon? Themselves?