We watched a documentary on Logo last night called "The Elephant in the Room." The show followed gay Republicans as they lived their lives: one woman in Louisiana dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, a Log Cabin Republican organizer working against the Texas anti-gay amendment, and a city councilman in California looking for love. Watching these people go through their lives made me think of a strange consequence of the wingnut attack. Follow me after the jump...
We as liberals sometimes take the gay vote for granted, in my mind. In this day and age, there is just no home in the Republican Party for gays and lesbians. The Republicans exist, seemingly, to destroy their very way of life. My husband and I have a dear friend who is gay and started his out life as a very conservative Republican. Within a year, he was voting for Kerry, and now he displays an "Impeach the President" button on his briefcase and works for Democratic candidates when he gets the chance. He realized that there was no home for him there.
What dawned on me last night is that the central evil in the Republican strategy of gay-bashing to court evangelicals is that it robs gay people not only of civil rights, but of the right to live their lives politically as they see fit. This next sentence sounds weird, but the fact that there is no room for gays and lesbians in the Republican party, as much as it benefits us, is completely unfair to gay people who are conservative in every other way.
My husband asked me, and he's right to question, why I care about this. This phenomenon totally benefits us in every way, and I really shouldn't feel so weird about it, I know. But the whole point of being Americans is freedom of association, and the Republicans have conveniently eliminated that possibility for all gay Americans.
Believe me, I welcome our conservative gay refugees with open arms. I love phenomena that work in our favor. I just think this is another sad, disappointing aspect of how this particular brand of wingnut Republicanism is killing what it means to be American. No matter how much it helps us, it's still tragic.