What someone cares about on who they are voting for sometimes goes beyond one issue (although I would argue not for most as the majority of the American public are sheeple).
There is an episode of "The West Wing" where it is centered around a bill in defense of marriage and as President Bartlett correctly labels, legislative gay bashing. The deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, goes round and round with Congressman who is a gay republican and finally the guy tells Josh "Just ask me the question." Josh finally basically asks how he could be gay and a republican. And, in a response that is a reason a lot of people leaning right like the show, the character said he agrees with the republicans on 95% of the issues, why would he vote the other side because of one issue?
Unfortunately, as Zombie pointed out, any candidate is not coming out in full support of gay rights because right now, unfortunately, the majority of people in this country do or do not vote for a candidate for one issue.
And with republicans, from an election standpoint, why would they talk about gay rights or african-american rights when doing so would lose a lot more voters than gain?
But they
are talking about gay rights, specifically how best to infringe upon them. The thing is, at this point they're buttering up the base, which, within Republican circles is
increasingly Christianist. It's a trap from which I believe we'll need a severe electoral beating next year to correct. This base seems to not realize that more than
1/2 of Americans favor allowing same-sex marriage.
I have always believed that we need two functional parties in the US to survive, and currently the Republican party is being guided by extremists at the edge, not the folks in the middle. I have voted for a Republican before,
Bill Weld, and have never regretted it. But he got out of politics because socially he's unelectable as a Republican, except perhaps in Massachusetts or just maybe New York.
One of my best friends is a political consultant who heads an extremely conservative company (his business partner worked for Jesse Helms
). It took a lot of discussion and listening between us before I could understand how anyone can be conservative, gay, HIV+ and atheist all at once. He was a life-long Republican until 2008, when he voted for Obama, due mainly to the fact that he couldn't abide Sarah Palin. He understood that you cannot put a 72-year-old Cancer survivor in the world's most stressful job with her as a Plan B.
So now he considers himself to be an extremely conservative Independent, and will stay that way until the GOP returns to sanity. I have another very good friend who is in every way a Republican except for the fact that, as an HIV+ gay man, he's anathema to the party's principles. He considers himself to be a very conservative Blue Dog.
FWIW, at this point they loathe Obama: just can't stand him.