On gay marriage, the ship has indeed sailed. Never was that more apparent than at Turning Point USA's High School Leadership Summit on Wednesday, where an audience of hundreds* of conservative teens erupted into wild applause after speaker Dave Rubin said he was in a same-sex relationship.
"I'm gay married," said Rubin. "You people don't care about that, do you?"
They did not. In fact, they cheered Rubin.
"The ship has sailed. We're equal. It's great."—@RubinReport on gay marriage. Lots of applause from crowd. #HSLS2018 — Robby Soave (@robbysoave) July 25, 2018
Make no mistake: This was a deeply conservative, politically active audience. When former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling polled them earlier in the day, I estimated just 40 percent of them self-identified as libertarian or center-right (Trump-skeptical, in other words). The rest are conservatives. The vast majority seem both pro-life and passionate about the pro-life cause. I saw Make America Great Again hats and National Rifle Association hats. The teens cheered for Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. They even broke into chants of "lock her up" whenever anyone uttered the name "Hillary Clinton"—something that attracted considerable derision from the mainstream media. (This was not an edifying moment for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, though the press made too much of it: He didn't actually join the chant.)
If these teens represent the future of the right, then the right will continue to be pro-Trump, pro-gun, and pro-life. But thwarting gay marriage has faded as an animating cause, and that's certainly something for liberals and libertarians to be happy about.
*Update: I initially described the crowd as consisting of roughly 200 people. A spokesperson for TPUSA tells me that they had 800 attendees overall, though not all of them were sitting in the front section where I could see them.
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