Hooray! It is time to announce a Nice Thing that happened, which we don't get to do very often because Republicans have a War on Nice Things, but every now and then, they let something slip through. And today, that something is Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is sometimes a Republican (like when she votes with her party to war on ladyparts), and sometimes is disgusted by Republicans (like when they vote to war on ladyparts, which she also voted for but then felt super bad about), and sometimes she is a Ralph Naderesque spoiler write-in candidate when Republican primary voters are all, like, "Nah, lady, we're going with the crazy dude."

But today ... today Sen. Murkowski is -- well, we still don't know what the hell she is, but we know she hearts gay marriage:

I am a life-long Republican because I believe in promoting freedom and limiting the reach of government. When government does act, I believe it should encourage family values. I support the right of all Americans to marry the person they love and choose because I believe doing so promotes both values: it keeps politicians out of the most private and personal aspects of peoples’ lives – while also encouraging more families to form and more adults to make a lifetime commitment to one another.

Awwww. That's so nice, isn't it? Of course, then she has to toss in some steaming pile of donkeyshit about how she is "equally committed to guaranteeing that religious freedoms remain inviolate, so that churches and other religious institutions can continue to determine and practice their own definition of marriage," which basically means she does not want the Bible-humpers to be mad at her and so, wink wink, she also supports their right to hate gays because freedom. And then, for good measure, she mentions Ronald Reagan, because there is still a law on the books that Republicans must always invoke Ronald Reagan to justify everything they believe or else he will eat their brains we guess? (Democrats, however, are forbidden from ever citing Reagan, like, say, for example, to point out that he raised taxes or supported background checks and waiting periods when purchasing guns, because then they are desecrating his rotted zombie corpse memory or something.)

Anyhoo, we are very glad that Lisa Murkowski would like her constituents to know that she is not a homophobic bigot and can see the marriage equality writing on the wall, and we hope very hard that when she finally does have her schizophrenic breakdown because trying to decide whether she is or is not or is or is not a Republican gets too confusing, it is in 2016, after she has won her party's nomination for re-election to the Senate.

[Lisa Murkowski]