Via Joe Sudbay, here’s a list of the 94 House Republicans (so far) who have lined up to co-sponsor a resolution demanding that President Obama defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. Sudbay points out that ye olde conventional wisdom says tea partiers only care about taxes and government spending, once again, their actions disprove that theory.
As the Public Religion Research Institute showed last year, tea party adherents are much more likely than the general population to oppose gay marriage. The PRRI poll found that while 33% of the general public opposes any legal recognition for same-sex couples, 45% of tea partiers do; while 37% of the general public supports gay marriage, only 18% of tea partiers do. This mirrored a similar finding in a University of Washington poll, which found that only 18% of Washington state tea partiers believe that gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry (as compared to 41% of all voters). In other words, tea partiers are very much like the Republican Party on gay marriage.
What’s the difference between a Tea Partier and a Republican? Well, of course, it’s hard to tell. But if you wanted to split hairs, and argue that Tea Partiers are opposed to abortion rights and gay marriage, but that they just don’t want to put it on the forefront of their agenda, their conduct so far in the new Congress, particularly on abortion, and now on DOMA, makes clear that anyone buying the it’s-a-movement-about-fiscal-issues line was duped.
Another data point: of the 94 co-sponsors of the DOMA resolution, 29 of them have gone to the trouble of joining Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus. And another: Right Wing Watch reports on how religious right candidates got elected to Congress “under the radar” during the rise of the Tea Party — part of a “farm system.”
