While Democrats have been the party linked most to the advocacy of gay marriage over the last decade, a major conservative Republican big-money donor is about to change all of that.
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni reports that billionaire hedge fund manager Paul E. Singer, one of the most important Republican donors nationwide, is providing more than $1 million to start a new super PAC with several Republican compatriots to encourage GOP candidates to support same-sex marriage.
The money, says Singer, is to help them “feel financially shielded from any blowback from well-funded groups that oppose it.”
Singer is a staunch conservative, and that’s going to really complicate things for opponents who have been accustomed to dealing with the gay marriage push from the traditional left. In just one Manhattan fund-raiser last month, he helped to collect more than $5 million for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, Bruni points out.
“There’s a feeling among some people that the Republican Party is harsh on some things,” Singer told Bruni. Referring to opposition to same-sex marriage, he added: “Atmospherically and tonally, it’s part of the landscape of so-called harshness.”
In a CNN/ORC International poll released Wednesday, a whopping 73 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 said they favored marriage equality.
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