The good news is that Republicans only have two more years of this racist shit to run on. Also, the Court gay marriage rulings are happening now, and this will simply be the established state of play in 2016. No Republican running on the national stage is going to be very vocal about wanting to overturn it then, in fact the Party establishment wing will probably fight pretty hard to keep opposition to gays out of the official GOP platform. They may well lose out to the fundies, but fucking over a bunch of de facto and de jure married couples isn’t going to play well in the debates, and the smart Republicans know this.

The thing about white older Americans especially is that most of them honestly don’t think they’re racist. They are of course incredibly racist, in large part because of this inability, this refusal to identify and acknowledge the natural prejudice that pretty much everyone has. We are products of our environment, everyone has past experiences that shapes their perceptions. Everyone has some fucked up ideas that creep in periodically, the options are to either acknowledge and try to deal with them intellectually or to live in reflexive denial. The problem with older white conservatives is that dealing with your own shit requires introspection, and applying that back to how one views people different from them requires empathy, two things they’re generally not good at.

Last time my Mom was here we got to talking about politics, which is really never a good idea. She said she really, honestly thinks that Obama has some kind of animus towards white people. It was sad, and even sadder was that she couldn’t name a single reason for why she felt this way, she just did. Her and my step-dad listen to Fox News all the time, and when they’re not home they force their furniture to listen to it. So it’s no wonder where they get these ideas, but the reason such fucked up ideas find any purchase at all is that it never occurred to them that they personally could possibly harbor any prejudices. And that genuine denial, that rote lack of introspection is what allows them at times to say, and honestly believe some of the most fucked up shit imaginable.