One is the importance that coming-of-age voters attach to gay equality. You could see that in the repeated and persistent questions conservative cultural warrior Rick Santorum faced from younger voters in New Hampshire about his hard-line anti-gay-marriage stance.
Gay marriage was the first question out of the box after Santorum spoke at the Dublin School, a prep school in western New Hampshire. Nor were the students satisfied with his argument that marriage was not a right, but rather a privilege bestowed to encourage child-rearing. Or that allowing same-sex matrimony would mean depriving children of their right to have both a mother and a father. Or that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead ineluctably to polygamy. They returned to the issue repeatedly, using Santorum’s answers as a jumping-off point for further challenges.
That was hardly Santorum’s only youthful grilling on the subject. Indeed, the hostile reception he got from students at a college convention in Concord, where the former senator treated his sophistic slippery-slope-to-polygamy argument as though it were trump, made headlines.
Overall, 51 percent of adults favor gay marriage, with 45 opposed, but among adults under 30, 65 percent back same-sex unions, with only 32 percent opposed, says Gary Langer, president of Langer Research Associates and the pollster for ABC News. Santorum’s experience in New Hampshire suggests that for Gen Yers, gay equality is not just one of many issues, but rather a primary concern in evaluating a politician.
“The notion of full equality for people regardless of sexual orientation is a core conviction of their generation,’’ notes Ralph Whitehead, a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
There are several reasons younger voters are attracted to Ron Paul. The libertarian Republican appears authentic; he’s generally consistent; he’s been the only real anti-war candidate in the Republican field.
