Rob Portman Changes Gay Marriage Stance It's becoming positively fashionable for Republicans who no longer think they have a shot at national office to drop their opposition to gay marriage. Jon Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah, was one of dozens of Republicans who signed a legal brief for the Supreme Court on the subject, executing a neat about face from his presidential run just last year, when he was opposed to gay marriage. Now comes Senator Rob Portman, who also was a possible vice presidential nominee in 2012, and has long been an opponent of same-sex marriage. In 1999, he even voted against allowing same-sex couples in Washington, D.C., to adopt children. But he says he's gained a new perspective, which came from his son telling him that he is gay - two years ago. "It allowed me to think of this issue from a new perspective, and that's of a dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have - to have a relationship like Jane and I have had for over 26 years," Mr. Portman told reporters, according to Cleveland.com. Mr. Portman now says that Congress should repeal parts of the Defense of Marriage Act, a clearly unconstitutional law for which Mr. Portman voted when he was in the House in 1996. DOMA is the subject of one of two cases that are now before the Supreme Court on gay marriage. The other one seeks to overturn California's proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage. In what Cleveland.com described as a "carefully orchestrated" public change of heart, Mr. Portman said that he and his wife were surprised to learn their son was gay but that they "were 100 percent supportive." Supportive enough to tell the Romney campaign that his son was gay, but not supportive enough to back off his public opposition to equal rights for gay people while he was under consideration for the V.P. slot. So what's changed? For one thing, the most recent Republican ticket to take hard-right positions on social issues failed to win the White House against a Democrat who declared his support for gay marriage during the campaign, not after it. And polls of every kind show that the tide has turned against government-sanctioned discrimination against gay men and lesbians. But Mr. Portman is still hedging his bets. He says that the issue of marriage equality should be left up to the states - so some would grant marriage rights to everyone and others would not. Until this week, Mr. Obama also took that position as part of his "evolution" on the issue, but has now dropped it. And for good reason. It's sort of like, say, letting states decide whether to ban inter-racial marriage. It's just not constitutional. This blog post has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: March 15, 2013 A previous version of this post stated that Mr. Portman wants the Supreme Court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. Actually, he said that Congress should repeal parts of it.