Louisiana governor Jindal: Republicans can win while opposing LGBT rights

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Sunday said that Republicans could win elections while continuing to discriminate against LGBT people because they an "aspirational party" with a vision for private sector growth.

In a column for The American Conservative last week, Mormon former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman argued that Republicans must support marriage equality because "the American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty."

"Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry," Huntsman wrote. "I’ve been married for 29 years. My marriage has been the greatest joy of my life. There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love."

On Sunday, NBC's David Gregory asked Jindal if agreed that equal marriage rights were a conservative value.

"Look, I believe in the traditional definition of marriage," the Louisiana governor explained. "Let's be clear about what happened in this last election. We had an election that was dominated by domestic issues... We still lost an election where a majority of the American people said, 'We think the federal government is doing too much.'"

"We lost that election because we didn't present a vision showing how we believe the entire economy can grow, how people can join the middle class."

Jindal concluded: 'We're an aspirational party, and we need policies that are consistent with that aspirational private sector growth."

Watch this video from NBC's Meet the Press via Video Cafe, broadcast Feb. 24, 2013.