In a well-functioning democracy (or rather, in any democracy that hopes to remain well-functioning), hypocrisy is somewhere between a necessary evil and flat out commendable. No, don't argue about this. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps the gears of a deliberative society from tearing themselves apart. There needs to be some wiggle room - a legal commitment to a wall Church better State with mangers in city squares; a public acknowledgment to color-blindness with some affirmative action here and there to smooth things out; a social disdain for torture with soldiers who will torture a terrorist to death to stop a ticking bomb - and then bear the legal consequences for their actions. On one hand, this is a profoundly conservative notion of society - taboos and open secrets working to create spaces where people can tolerate one another. On the other hand, if you're a progressive reader, you really need to understand that your faith in speaking only rigorous and coherent truth to power is not a good idea - if you don't believe that, please describe a rigorous ethical theory that precludes infanticide but allows most abortions. This is why we distrust populist revolutions so much, and why we're so adamant that people recognize that revolutions always eat their children - revolutions are mass movements demanding accountability to a single social vision, an impossible task for any democracy over any period of time. Err one way and you have the anarchy of no norms. Err the other way and you have the literal fascism of state or locally-enforced norms.

There has to be a little wiggle room between what's written down / explicitly endorsed and how people actually behave, lest revolutions and pogroms replace live and let live. So we have no problem hanging on to de facto elite Republican acceptance of homosexuality as the thin thread that would keep us voting for them in November (if we weren't already sitting this one out). Would it be better if there was explicit Republican endorsement of homosexuals' legal equality? Obviously, yes. This matter is a little more complicated, because the hypocrisy has demonstrable material harm - it's not like Church/State issues where people are looking to get offended. We could care less if someone thinks that "Under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance even though the legislative history is a kill on the argument that it's a violation of Church/State separation. We are not inclined to support someone less on account of hypocrisy in that area. In the are of homosexual rights, on the other hand, we are less inclined to vote for someone who doesn't support equality.

The difference is that - because we have no problem with hypocrisy - we're willing to make the issue a matter of degree rather than an absolute matter. So the Republicans still get a lot of credit because we don't think that they really hate gays (and so we don't think that there's a real risk of some of the more hysterical, genocide-esque slippery slope consequences). So a little bit of Republican homophobia versus the explosion of plebian resentment that will be the first 100 days of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Easy call.