Sunday, February 13, 2011

Coulter: Gays Should Be Republicans

I am trying to imagine how this would work.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter brought today's audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington to its feet in applause after urging the Republican party to include gays - perhaps getting the last word on the place gays have in the conservative movement after a tussle that pitted social conservatives against libertarians at this year's conference.

"The left is trying to co-opt gays," she said. "They should be on our side."

The fight over the Republican party's acceptance of gay conservatives and gay rights came to a head at CPAC, after organizers invited the gay conservative group GOProud to be an official participant. Some social conservative groups protested the convention as a result, but gay conservatives and their allies this week declared victory, observing that they were well-received at the event. Ann Coulter: "The Left is Trying to Co-Opt Gays"

The Republican Party is a bizarre mashup of groups that have almost nothing in common, I think of the party as being made of sheep and shepherds, where the sheep far outnumber the smarter shepherds. You have on one side, how to put this delicately, rich people. I mean, really, can you believe the fight in Congress recently over taxing the super-rich? The GOP is their playground. Since the rich make up a tiny-and-shrinking percentage of the voters, they need to cultivate their flocks of, how to put this delicately, suckers. Their emotions are easily tweaked by evocation of The Frightening Other -- any outgroup will be enthusiastically hated, whether it is Muslims, gays, welfare mothers, Planned Parenthood, the Threat O' the Day keeps the sheep in a tight group, no one dares stray.

Gay people have been a kind of perfect outgroup for conservatives. The decades-long LGBT campaign to overcome stereotypes and acquire a voice in the national dialog is easily painted as a conspiracy, an "agenda," and it can be hard for straight people to empathize or understand how it is that anyone could find a member of their own sex attractive. So the issue is easily painted as a moral choice, and the obvious conclusion is that gay people are evil.

Is it possible to have a political party that promotes privilege for the rich, bank-breakingly heavy investment in the military, and elimination of programs that help the poor, the sick, minorities, and women, and is also inclusive of gays? The task for Republicans is to devise a public visage that gay people can accept without feeling overwhelmed by the cognitive dissonance resulting from embracing an ideological that strives to crush them. For instance, a gay person who holds the belief, "I am a respectable and decent person," is going to find his belief is inconsistent with everything that social conservatives in the Republican Party espouse.

So how would this work? I think it will work only for gay Republicans who do not have the belief, "I am a respectable and decent person." I think GOProud's Matt Hissey made the point perfectly well when he told Metro Weekly: "I don't really like gay people. Gay people frustrate me, the stereotypical gay people, it frustrates me." Asked for an example, he said, "Like someone who puts on a total act. Like I understand some guys are feminine which is fine, but some guys are really like at some point they're normal, straight-acting, whatever, and the next minute they're jumping up and down, they're having -- it just frustrates me."

It looks like it might be possible for the Republican Party to attract and include gay people who see other gay people in terms of negative stereotypes and count themselves as exceptions. I'm guessing that the liberal view that accepts and welcomes differences among people will always be more appealing to the majority of LGBT people. I'm just not seeing them joining the GOP flock quite yet.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"can you believe the fight in Congress recently over taxing the super-rich?"

thank you Barack Obama for coming to the rescue of the ultra-rich who were being unfairly persecuted and singled out for ....EXTRA TAXATION!!

gays are wealthier than the average American so they will eventually electroslide to the Republican Party- especially since a significant segment of the Republican Party already supports the gay agenda

although interrupted by the historic nature of the Obama candidacy in 2008, the overarching trend has now resumed toward having two viable parties in America, now manifested as the Republicans and the Tea Party

the San Francisco Democrats, as Jeanne Kirkpatrick once termed them, is headed to the netherworld to commiserate with the Whigs

they blew their last chance

February 13, 2011 7:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Huffingtonpost:
In an interview with the Huffington Post Saturday morning, Christopher Barron, co-founder and board chairman of the gay conservative advocacy group GOProud, clearly laid out the group's position vis-à-vis Democrats and what conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart has labeled as, "the activist gay left." "Generally 95% of our hate mail and our criticism comes from the left," says Barron, "the tolerance and diversity crowd on the left has absolutely no tolerance for diversity of ideological views."
GoProud does not believe in gay marriage!

February 13, 2011 11:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The weekend's CPAC convention drew the usual suspects in Michele Bachmann and Ann Coulter with Ron Paul once again winning the presidential straw poll. But among the participants, and receiving far less media attention that either Bachmann or Paul was the nationwide white supremacist student group Youth for Western Civilization.

The group's mission statement, according to their website is as follows: "We have the self-evident right and duty to work for the survival of our own culture and civilization. There is no reason to believe that the advances of modernity and the political freedoms we enjoy will endure with the extinction of the civilization that allowed them to exist. Western Civilization is our civilization and in spite of the continual assault and hatred it endures from the radical left, we wish to revive the West, rather than see our civilization be sent to the graveyard of history."'

The group's presence is yet another reminder that the GOP is no longer just flirting with the racist right. The party has fully embraced it.

Youth for Western Civilization at CPAC

February 14, 2011 8:52 AM  
Blogger Sober Susan said...

Well, I am gay and a Republican and I am little offended; I would like to think I am a respectable and decent person. I do hope that one day the Republican Party and its constituents find the middle ground in regards to the gay question (which there is a group called the Log Cabin Republicans that do support gays). By saying gays can't be Republicans though, you are only perpetuating a nasty stereotype - it is almost like you're saying that all gays have the same priorities and therefore logically we should all be liberals. But I think the Republican Party, to survive, needs to move forward, or they will be swept away in the future.

March 02, 2011 7:32 PM  

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