The problem is this, GOPValues; while those are the people who may vote on our issues, those aren’t the voters who elect the people who vote on our issues. Moreover, HRC and NGLTF don’t limit their linking of “being gay” to, as I put it, “pro-abortion, anti-religious, tax-raising, corporate-bashing, foul-mouthed hatemonger(ing)” activities to elected officials and party activists; they air it to the public, and that viewpoint is what gets locked in the mind of voters as to what gays are.

The “behind closed doors” method only works when voters are apathetic and/or feel powerless to do anything about it, because it depends solely on legislators being convinced there will be little to no penalty for their actions. What the right wing has figured out is that angry and empowered voters can bring even the most obstreperous legislator to heel or go completely around them (i.e. petitions and referendums); what’s worse is that they need only point out HRC and NGLTF’s antireligious, pro-sex and pro-abortion public screeds as proof for their assertions that gays are immoral sex-pushers, and there’s nothing, not one public thing, out there to contradict that.

My biggest beef with Patrick’s actions last year was that he was going down the same path of irrelevance that HRC and NGLTF have followed to its end — bash (or let voters be bashed) publicly, kiss politico butt in private, and wail about how ignorant the electorate is when the vote goes against them. Fixing the first makes the second that much more effective and minimizes the possibility of the third.

Also, what prohibits YOU from writing, calling, and emailing your disagreements with the gay left in publications or directly to elected officials? Why is it that you expect LCR to have to do that on your behalf?

Um….if I were waiting for LCR to do my work for me, why would I be doing this?

And, as far as airing my disagreements with the gay left, anyone who reads my blog should be able to figure that one out in about ten seconds.

When LCR is constantly standing up and supportive of the GOP on most issues, and is vocal about it, I don’t understand why they have to defend the supposed Republican position on such issues as abortion, where there’s actually a significant split in the party. That’s not LCR’s role.

That’s not my expectation for LCR. What IS my expectation is that LCR will stand up when Matt Foreman, Joe Solmonese, and whoever’s leading Stonewall this week are foaming at the mouth, saying that gay rights and unlimited abortion are the same thing, and publicly point out that this is a) false, b) counterproductive, and c) not inclusive of the multiple viewpoints that exist in the gay community and in the Republican Party on this issue.

The fact remains that the ONLY thing we definitively have in common among all of the lgbt organizations is to strive for equality under law. The NGLTF is essentially a socialist organization. LCR is a Republican organization. God only knows what the heck HRC is, since even THEY don’t know. The point is that it’s the desire for equal treatment under law that unites us, and THAT should be the focus of our cooperation. Trashing the other ridiculous aspects of their agendas doesn’t further us toward that goal … or raise us in the eyes of other Republicans.

Also, what prohibits YOU from writing, calling, and emailing your disagreements with the gay left in publications or directly to elected officials? Why is it that you expect LCR to have to do that on your behalf? When LCR is constantly standing up and supportive of the GOP on most issues, and is vocal about it, I don’t understand why they have to defend the supposed Republican position on such issues as abortion, where there’s actually a significant split in the party. That’s not LCR’s role. As has been stated multiple times, LCR exists to go out of business: to make the GOP understand the need for gay and lesbian Americans to be treated equally under the law. It’s not there to be yet another mouthpiece (aren’t there enough already?) for those who oppose abortion.

That’s my objection to having to work with gay organizations here in Washington state: I don’t like everything they stand for. However, I do what I can to work with them to the degree that I can, and make clear to Republican elected officials where we disagree. But I don’t do that publicly; I do it directly with the people we need to talk with on a more consistent basis — the elected officials and party officials. In fact, it assists us by allowing us to draw distinctions between us and the socialists and leftists in the “gay community.” That has been of FAR greater value than if I took shots at the other gay groups in public.

That has been a bit of time.

Wow!

How old are we?

I can’t begin to add up the hours (days and weeks) volunteered, the miles traveled by car, train and plane and the dollars upon dollars donated for the good of the Republican Party and local, state and national Republican candidates in the years that followed…until the ideologues shrunk the tent and there was no longer room for those of us in the Goldwater wing.

I will say this to you, Dan, and I sincerely mean it. I don’t agree with everything the Log Cabin Republicans do or don’t do but the LCR is the ONLY Republican organization that still fights for the most important traditional Republican principles!

You have my e-mail address, Dan, if you’d like to privately discuss this in more depth.

I already showed the productive end of expressing such disagreement — building bridges to the GOP. This way, they show that they are not beholden to the same liberal policies of the gay groups. And yes, we do gain more clout that way. That’s one reason our club grew so quickly in Northern Virginia.

I do agree with you that volunteering, donating to campaigns, etc. does help with the GOP.

Did you even bother to read my entire post? I make clear that the Advocate skews left. Thus, it should be troubling (to gay Republicans) that they wrote a puff piece on Patrick Guerriero. Indeed, one reader reported to me that the local LCR president sent a copy out to his list.

Well said, Dale in #23. Very well said.

Well, GayMalibu (Cowboy?) Ken, I never said that this gay Republican group should only take action on non-gay issues. Please go back and read the post. By your logic, if you have a gay Republican group which only takes action on gay issues (as Log Cabin by and large does), then you just have a GAY group.

I disagree with that statement. The line needed to be drawn, and fortunately LCR had the strength to do it. My sole disagreement with their doing so was their channeling the saved money into attack ads against the religious, instead of focusing on positive activities.

It serves those of us in the gay community who are sick and tired of being characterized as pro-abortion, anti-religious, tax-raising, corporate-bashing, foul-mouthed hatemongers because of our sexual orientation.

Where does that come from? The fact that HRC, NGLTF, et al. do all of those in the name of “gay rights” and no one says anything about it.

An excellent example is abortion. As CNN reported today, only 26% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all circumstances, while a whopping 69% think minors should be required to get parental consent to have one.

However, to hear HRC and NGLTF tell it, “gay rights” require unrestricted abortion and no parental notification. It also fatally impairs the credibility of organizations like LCR to differentiate themselves in such matters when their political director jumps directly to something that stands for both in most American’s eyes (Planned Parenthood).

In short, GOPValues, if chasing “unity” above all else requires us to stay chained to absurd ideas that the bulk of Americans reject, we don’t need “unity”.

I vigorously supported LCR when they ran their campaign against FMA, an act that was potentially damaging to the president’s campaign, and the battle was won. FMA failed to pass by a safe margin. They showed they weren’t spineless and they weren’t apologists.

Not endorsing the best candidate in the presidential election in a time of war after winning the battle against FMA amounted to poor sportsmanship (throwing a tantrum) and showed they did not have their priorities in order. They could have made a qualified endorsement, pointing to their victory over FMA, and saved ground with the party.

I’ve stopped paying dues and I can’t imagine I’m the only conservative who feels alienated or at least unenthusiastic about supporting the group. I’m not surprised they gained membership because the FMA campaign and the decision not to endorse got them publicity, some of it from becoming darlings of the liberal MSM. I anticipated a dramatic shift to the left from all these new members. Maybe they will be bigger and have more money, but they’ve done so by sacrificing their conservative principles and I don’t see that as a win.

Simply because LCR has not taken PUBLIC swipes at other lgbt organizations for some of their more ludicrous positions doesn’t mean it hasn’t expressed opposition to expressed points of view at all. It just means it’s done privately. (And it IS being done privately).

Take a look at our enemies. Do you see the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Concerned Women for Amercia, etc. PUBLICLY take each other to task for the “violations” they see amongst themselves? Of course not. Why should the “gay community” wash its disagreements in public too? Who does it serve? Our enemies are the only ones who benefit when we snipe at each other publicly. For far too many years LCR and the other lgbt organizations wasted resources on such pursuits. To what productive end?

Second, I disagree with the premise that we somehow have more clout with Republican leaders and organizations when we publicly disagree with other lgbt organizations. That’s a fallacy.

Our clout comes from the good works we do within the Republican party …. volunteering, donating, and working on behalf of inclusive Republicans and our issues. Most legislators make little distinction between gay groups EXCEPT at the local level, and that is where we stand in stark contrast. What we DO is much more important than what we say (or don’t say.)

Lastly, I’m surprised that you would take The Advocate’s perspective on anything. That rag leans so far left that anything that’s said there has to be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

I’m more concerned with results than methodology. If working with the rest of the lgbt organizations, by leveraging all of our resouces, results in what we want achieved (equality under law), then holstering our political firearms against our fellow lgbt organizations may prove to be the correct approach.

Not quite, Gryph.

“What I really want people to understand is rather than seeing these as political contests, these are really profound, unfair, bordering on immoral elections,” Foreman told Reuters on Saturday.

Really, it’s nothing unusual, though; he said the same thing (“these amendment votes (are) unjust and immoral”) about the Kansas vote in April.

Foreman saying this always reminds me of a spoiled brat whose parents, after years of being called names, spit on, kicked, and defied, suddenly discover the virtues of discipline. The kid can scream all he wants, but the fact of the matter is that his parents have the right to punish him — and he quite honestly brought it upon himself.

One of these days, the gay left will make the connection that their constant namecalling of the religious, their applauding the desecration of churches by AIDS activists, and their support of teenage sex-pushers and people who solicit sex in public bathrooms — all in the name of being gay, of course — has more to do with the fact that a majority of Americans still view homosexuality as “immoral” than anything else and see very little wrong with denying gays rights. But it’s not going to happen until they make the connection that people like Foreman use gay rights as justification for hatemongering.

And was the LCR membership complaining about lack of respect/appreciation from other gay groups? One of the many reasons I (as a club president) was at odds with Patrick’s predecessor (in the late 1990s) was that, in a debate with Urvaishi Vaid, the then-LCR Executive Director beamed when the “moderator” of the debate, former California Democratic chair Bill Press called their exchange a “lovefest.” At the time, most LCR members I knew thought the national organization needed to distinguish itself from left-wing activists like Ms. Vaid.

I think LCR should be more concerned with its own party thinks of it than with securing the admiration of the gay groups. After all, it’s Republicans whose attitudes they claim to want to change.

Where have you seen documentation of the “vastly increased membership” other than it coming out of the mouth of Patrick Guerriero?

I was thus hardly surprised when Log Cabin’s Political Director Chris Barron refused to criticize NGLTF President Matt Foreman for suggesting democracy was immoral

Matt Foreman never said or suggested any such thing and no matter how many times you quote him out of context you are not going to make it so. What he said is that voting for an anti-gay initiative is immoral. Not the act of voting itself.

You personally don’t approve of Chris Barron or Matt Foreman. Fine. I get that. Sheesh. You sound like Andrew Sullivan reviewing a Tony Kushner play.

And it wasn’t so long ago that the LCR membership was complaining to the high heavens that other gay and lesbian organizations didn’t respect them or appreciate them. Now that such organizations are actually starting to do this, you complain about it. Sheesh X2!.

The vastly increased membership of LCR speaks for itself. The members are voting with their feet. And it’s for the policies of the current board, not against them. Unless you want to call such democratic means of approval “immoral” of course.

Yes, LCR did a good job in standing up for social security reform — and we commended them for it. But, if they stood so strong in the fight against terrorism, why didn’t their leaders say as much in last fall’s campaign, regularly commending the president for his leadership in those endeavors at the same time they criticized the president on the FMA. They did do this occasionally, but more often resorted merely to badmouthing Bush — even (as I noted in the post) making a gratuitous swipe as him (& his closest political advisor) in a statement whose ostensible purpose was to criticize his Democratic opponent.

If LCR is to be an organization of the Goldwater/Reagan mold, then they can’t remain silent when left-wing gay groups continue to badmouth conservatives and our leaders. Nor can they continue to criticize the GOP as they have.