Opinion

When ‘Yes’ isn’t enough

Up to now, both Hillary Clinton and Rob Portman have held that marriage should be reserved for the union of a man and a woman. This month each switched. Now President Obama’s former secretary of state and the Ohio Republican on Romney’s short list for VP both support marriage for gay Americans.

Clinton’s switch has been accepted with cheers. Not so, Portman’s.

The logic seems to be that Clinton made her decision based on civil-rights concerns, while Portman reached his because of his son. In announcing his switch, he said he’d wrestled between his faith and his son’s happiness. As one prominent activist tweeted, “Hillary Clinton comes out for marriage equality — because it’s the right thing to do, not just for her kid.”

Never mind that embracing gay marriage in the GOP carries a risk while it’s completely safe for a Democrat. Or that another prominent flip-flopper on the issue — Barack Obama — also invoked personal experience (conversations with his daughters about friends with same-sex parents). Or that a good part of the effort to persuade opponents to shift has been based on the slogan, “We are your children.”

Jimmy LaSalvia, executive director of the conservative gay-rights group GOProud, explains the attacks on Portman this way: “It just goes to show that the gay left hates conservatives no matter what their position on marriage.”

We’ll leave it at this: What kind of activist asks people to have a change of heart, and then berates them when they do?