Republicans urged to abandon "narrowness" and "losing fight" on gay rights

David Frum, author and former speechwriter to President George W Bush, has launched NewMajority.com.  It styles itself as a website that can build "a conservatism that can win again".  Although David Frum is contributing enthusiastically there are many other voices too.  Early posts are calling the party away from 'narrowness':

> John Avlon of the Manhattan Institute calling for greater respect to fellow Republicans: "Somehow Republicans have lost common ground – Reagan invoked the Big Tent constantly as a way of collecting libertarian conservatives, national security conservatives, economic conservatives and social conservatives under one banner.  But the spirit of outreach and inclusiveness has been drummed out of the GOP – disagreement is seen as disloyalty, and the search for heretics has become a hobby.  Libertarians are losing any logical reason to affiliate with the GOP, while centrist Republicans are seen as suspect almost by definition.  When Senators like Olympia Snowe or John McCain win re-election with over 70% of the vote, they are considered sell-outs rather than successes. I’ve debated conservatives on TV who were rooting for Norm Coleman to lose, because they considered him insufficiently conservative.  This road leads not just to political disaster, but party suicide."

> James Kirchick calls on the GOP to give up a "losing fight" on gay rights: "Conservatives face a stark choice. They can succumb to the short-term temptation of erstwhile electoral victory and continue to support regressive policies on gay rights that are fast going out of fashion. Or they can look at the statistics, talk to their younger colleagues, coolly survey the direction in which the culture is inevitably headed, and plan accordingly. This doesn’t necessarily require the GOP to support gay marriage, just to stand out of the way of what’s coming."

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has sat down for an interview with NewMajority.com and has called for the Republicans to become less narrow and less sectional:

Tim Montgomerie