Former House Speaker and White House hopeful Newt Gingrich made a surprising admission, saying he accepts gay marriage as both inevitable and okay by him.
Legalization of same-sex marriage in three states in 2012's election changed the debate over the issue, and conservatives have to come to terms with it, he said.
"It is in every family, in every community." he said. "The momentum is clearly now in the direction of finding some way to ... accommodate and deal with reality."
"And the reality is going to be that in a number of American states - and it will be more after 2014 - gay relationships are going to be legal, period."
The thrice-married Newt Gingrich, a Republican social conservative, said he recognizes the distinction between religious and civil marriage.
He and his Roman Catholic church consider the former to be limited to male-female couples, but he has no problem with states giving legal recognition to same-sex couples.
This is a significant departure from Gingrich's previous stance; just this year, while seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he opposed gay marriage.
Stridently, in fact.
"The effort to create alternatives to marriage between a man and a woman are perfectly natural pagan behaviors, but they are a fundamental violation of our civilization," he said.
He also signed an Iowa conservative group's pledge to back the Defense of Marriage Act and to seek a federal constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.
A lot has changed since then, he said.
He spoke kindly of his lesbian half-sister, LGBT rights activist Candace Gingrich, and also of gay friends who've gotten married in Iowa, where gay marriage are legal.
Public opinion has shifted in favor of marriage equality, he said, and the GOP could end up on the wrong side of history if it continues to go against the tide.
"I didn't think that [gay marriage] was inevitable 10 or 15 years ago," he said. "It didn't seem at the time to be anything like as big a wave of change as we are now seeing."
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