Can the Democratic Party be an option for us Never Trumpers?

I read where we Never Trumpers are having more of an effect on the 2020 Democratic presidential race than we had on the 2016 GOP race when all of us were still Republicans.

Could be. It could also be that the American political system might be saved by an influx of center-right ex-Republicans into the Democratic Party, pulling that party back toward the center and preserving at least one viable place for responsible people to make their political home.

The Bernie Sanders and AOC and Elizabeth Warren crowd will still be around, of course, and that's as it should be; neither in my previous days as a Democrat nor during my recent Republican period have I ever expected my political party to be unified around my personal positions. I didn't leave the Democratic Party because there were pro-choice people in it, or even because most Democrats were pro-choice; I left it because, as exemplified by the defeat of the popular Attorney Gen. Tom Miller by 15,658 votes in the 1990 Iowa gubernatorial primary by an obscure State Senate president, it had become clear to me that the Democratic Party was simply hostile territory for pro-lifers. My vote might be welcome. My work on the phone banks or doing door-to-door canvassing would be readily accepted. But I would always be an oddity. I would always be marginalized. I would never be accepted as a real Democrat because I was pro-life.

Miller, a devout Catholic, was and is a perfectly orthodox liberal on every issue other than abortion. The most popular politician in the state, he was the only Democrat with a real chance of defeating then-Gov. Terry Branstad. Yet it was hard to miss the message the primary sent to people like me: that Iowa's Democrats would rather go down to defeat than win with a popular liberal candidate who happened to be personally pro-life.

I would have been fine with a Democratic Party which left the subject of legal abortion to the individual conscience, Being a pro-lifer in a predominantly pro-choice party would hardly have been ideal, but it also wouldn't have been the end of the world. I had been a pro-life Democrat for election after election, rationalizing my position by reminding myself that, rightly or wrongly, abortion was an issue in the realm of the courts, rather than of legislation. But somewhere along the line- partially with the emergence of feminism as a driving force in American politics- supporting legal abortion became an article of the Democratic faith.  Coupled with my years as a centrist Democrat doing graduate work at a seminary whose culture was monolithically left-wing and was committed to a foreign policy stance I had serious trouble with, I was becoming less and less comfortable identifying with a party which seemed to me during the Reagan years to be drifting out of the realm of responsible, reality-based policy.

The Republican Party of Mitt Romney and John McCain and even George W. Bush was a place I felt more at home. That, of course, ended when the Republican Party sold its soul to Donald Trump and chose to become the party of xenophobia, conspiracy-mongering, division, prejudice, and ignorance. Suddenly the GOP really was everything the Democrats had been claiming it was all those years when I was a Bush Republican scoffing at their claims. And worst of all, Republicans as a group- even those who had opposed Donald Trump's nomination- fell into line. betraying the principles of personal integrity and free trade and robust protection of America's interests throughout the world to support an ignorant crackpot who was not only personally unfit to be president in every way but patently so.

I could never be a Republican again. I could never feel at home among people whose commitment to principle had proven so superficial and so easily subverted by the appeal of power and the tantalizing opportunity to "own the libs."  If, as I hope, Donald Trump is buried in a Joe Biden landslide this November, it's remotely possible that something could happen like the response to Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964. The Republican Party might seek to reinvent itself. The conspiracy theorists and the alt-right yahoos might no longer be welcome. Never Trumpers as a group might return to the ranks of the GOP to fight for the party's soul.

But I fear that the party's soul is lost. Mike Pence and Ted Cruz and most of those likely to come forward to lead the post-Trump Republican Party are fundamentally honorable men, even though their honor may have been stained by their embrace of an authoritarian incompetent like Mr. Trump. They are well to my right on some issues. That in itself would not be a deal-breaker. Abraham Lincoln once said that almost anyone could withstand adversity, but that the ultimate test of a person's character is power. They have been tested by a choice between principle and power, between America's interests and those of an unprincipled leader with the ability to make or break them. And they have failed.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I was adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Marriage is an institution developed so that women could be certain that men who impregnated them would be around to support and help to raise their children, and so that men would have a socially- supported basis for a certainty that the children they were supporting were theirs. Monogamy and permanence are crucial to the concept, but in modern times divorce has become common and adultery not nearly as severely disapproved of.  It's axiomatic that the absence of possible pregnancy as a check and the nature of the male sex drive make gay men more promiscuous than straight ones; the average gay man has over a hundred sexual partners in his lifetime, compared to between nine and fifteen for straight men, depending on the study. Moreover, the usual absence of children has meant that "open" relationships even between committed gay partners are less destructive to the relationship and more common.

Women initiate two-thirds of divorces in America. It is hardly surprising that the data from European countries tend to show an exponentially higher divorce rate among lesbian than straight couples; while not as high, the divorce rate is also significantly higher among gay men.

I continue to insist upon the term "marriage redefinition" since "marriage equality" assumes a specific answer to the very question under debate, namely, whether straight, gay, and lesbian couples are all equally suited for a relationship defined by the expectation of childbearing and child-raising and thus of monogamy and permanence and whose fundamental purpose does not necessarily extend to gay and lesbian couples. Whatever one calls it, though, its advocates are correct in saying that the institution of marriage has always varied in its details from culture to culture, and has evolved over time. But seldom if ever has it involved individuals of the same sex, simply because the biological imperatives which make it necessary don't apply to same-sex couples.

Sexual orientation is not voluntarily chosen. It's simply not. Given that fact, my thinking on the subject has evolved. I believe that the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution demands that gay and lesbian couples have the same legal protections that married heterosexual couples have. Yet I continue to question the wisdom of redefining the most basic of human social institutions to include gay and lesbian couples rather than allowing gays and lesbians to develop their own parallel institutions, equally supported by law and custom, which fit their own circumstances more precisely. That's especially true at a moment at which both the permanence of marriage and even in some ways monogamy among heterosexual couples are under serious strain.

The matter is settled law. It's not going to change. But in the background is another issue which confuses the issue and hinders our discussion of the subject, and not least its politics.

Sexual orientation is a concept only about a century old. The implications of that fact are profound. Before that time "homosexuality" and "lesbianism" were behaviors, not ontological characteristics. Neither the Bible nor any other ancient religious text even addresses the question of homosexual or lesbian orientation. Yet both sides in the culture war seem to ignore that fact.

One cannot discriminate against behavior, and it is only to behavior that biblical objections to homosexuality and lesbianism arise. It should be mentioned that eisegetical attempts to remove those objections are unconvincing except to those more committed to evading the texts in question than understanding them. But there can no more be a religious or moral objection to homosexual orientation than to red hair or baldness or left-handedness.

I am against discrimination based on homosexual orientation. I can personally see no circumstance under which anyone might have a logical religious reason to even think of discriminating on that basis. But although I think it illogical, I don't see how on any reading of the First Amendment a sincere, religiously-based conviction that one would be actually sinning by, say, baking a cake for a gay wedding would not be constitutionally protected. Refusing to do so simply because one disapproves of gay marriage is another matter. But an objection- illogical and vanishingly rare as I suspect it might be- to being compelled to personally perform an act which one's religious beliefs define as a sin on their own part seems to me to be something the state simply does not have a compelling purpose for overriding since it has to do with one's own behavior rather than with mere disapproval of the behavior of others.

Would that position be acceptable in the Democratic Party? I have my doubts. It involves a fine distinction involving what I suspect would be a very rare case, and a distinction which I fear the cultural left would choose to disregard. But it illustrates the fact that in an increasingly secular society those on the social left tend more and more to infringe on people's religious liberty out of a confusion of categories and a misidentification of the grounds of disagreement.

Active hostility toward religion and religious conviction is a real thing in today's society- and that includes the Democratic Party. I clearly recall the 2012 Democratic National Convention. when then-Gov. Strickland of Ohio moved to amend the party platform to include a token reference to God. Despite the chair having declared the motion passed by voice vote, I doubt that anyone listening at the time could honestly deny that in fact it was clearly rejected by the delegates, and not by a small margin.

I, for one, am not able to buy into the whole concept of a multiplicity of genders which is orthodoxy not only on the social left but apparently in the Democratic Party itself, judging from the rhetoric of the presidential candidates this year.  Perhaps an influx of Never Trumpers would move the center of gravity in the Democratic Party back toward the center on these and a multiplicity of other social issues. Or maybe not. I simply don't know.

Could the Democratic Party be the future home of we who cannot be Republicans anymore because the very DNA of the GOP has been poisoned by Trumpism?  I don't know. Although he's far from ideal, I will vote for Biden this November. I will vote against every Republican I can identify as having embraced Donald Trump. I will do so because I believe that there is an overriding imperative not only to get Donald Trump out of the White House but to do everything possible in what may be the last election in which anything can be done to suppress the threat I believe Trumpism poses not only to the future of the Republican Party but to the future and well-being of the nation.

As of now, though, I continue to think primarily of a centrist third party as the most viable way to go, one which can break itself at the outset of the deeply entrenched biases and patterns of thought which have divided America and which threaten our unity as a nation. I am skeptical about whether joining the Democratic Party and moving it back toward the center will provide us with a viable forum.

But the one thing the idea has in its favor is that it may save the Democratic Party from having the same thing happen to it that happened to the Republicans. At a moment at which the wild-eyed ideological fanatics which already exercise entirely too much influence in the Democratic Party seem on the verge of taking it over, perhaps an influx of new members from the center-right will expand the Democratic coalition, pull it back toward the center, and even provide a viable place for people like me to stand.

And the notion has a second thing in its favor: as I watch people like Mitt Romney and John Kasich and the other people best positioned to lead the formation of a centrist third party, I see a profound absence of the will to do so. The Democrats might prove the only available option to continued- and permanent- political homelessness.

For me, personally, there could be worse things. I have never minded being a gadfly. But there is only so much even a swarm of gadflies can do.