Reader MV passed along a McClatchy article on a “quiet transformation is taking place in the Republican Party, which has begun to embrace openly gay candidates – and among gay Republicans, who now feel more comfortable speaking out in a party that may have accepted them but didn’t always show it.”

The article reports how the party is rallying behind one openly gay candidate,

Richard Tisei, a former Massachusetts state senator, who’s campaigning on what he describes as the number one issue for gay voters and everyone else in the state’s 6th Congressional District, north of Boston.

“In general, the campaign I’m running on is based on the economy,” he said.

Tisei does support same-sex marriage, and he said party leaders knew that from the beginning of his campaign for Congress.

“I don’t agree with the party platform, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a good Republican,” Tisei said.

Hmmm. . .  where did I hear that recently?

Tisei’s sexuality notwithstanding,

The National Republican Congressional Committee has designated Tisei as a “Young Gun,” meaning he’s on the national party’s radar and can expect to get more resources for his campaign. Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas said Tisei “has met organizational and fundraising benchmarks and has established himself as a strong contender.”

Does seem like some folks might need to change their narratives.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Chris H offers:

I’ve been saying this for years.. but once the “gay” thing goes away, the Democrats are going to have a really hard time maintaining their grasp on to the LGBT alphabet community.

My gay friends sure hate those Republicans … but when I discuss Liberterian/Republican concepts with out identifying them as “Republican” I generally get agreement.

Read the whole thing.

in 2004, in the decision that would (indirectly) launch my blogging career, Log Cabin passed up an opportunity that Richard Grenell yesterday seized with relish–the chance to articulate the role for gay conservatives within a party whose  entire agenda we do not support.

By failing to endorse George W. Bush (and making a spectacle of their non-endorsement), they failed to show their commitment to the broad principles of the GOP, particularly those relating to national security.  The organization’s leaders could have said although we disagree with President Bush on the Federal Marriage Amendment, we support his leadership in the War on Terror and share Ronald Reagan’s view that “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.”

“Like many voters,” Grenell wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, “I rarely agree with a candidate’s every position. I can support Mr. Romney for president but not agree with all of his stated policies.”  In 2004, Log Cabin could have well served gay conservatives by offering a similarly succinct statement supporting the reelection of George W. Bush.  In so doing, they would have made it a lot easier for skeptical (and non-doctrinaire) social conservatives to help us find welcome within the party’s ranks.

The good news is that the current executive director of Log Cabin, R. Clarke Cooper, (as did his immediate past predecessor) appears to share that view.  His rhetoric (alas!) may from time to time ape that of the gay left, but his commitment does seem to be finding a place for gay Republicans in the GOP.  (He has even used to his Facebook page to praise the man his organization once maligned — George W. Bush.)

It’s nice to see Log Cabin on the same page with Richard Grenell who, despite the Romney campaign’s awkward handling of his appointment, has shown a strong commitment to an imperfect GOP.  And has given greater voice to a notion we have been pushing at GayPatriot at least since Bruce launched the blog — and that I have promoting since I first joined Log Cabin in 1995.

When I first posted on Richard Grenell’s stepping down from the Romney campaign, I wrote that it was

. . . absurd to think that, as one social conservative quoted in Rubin’s piece suggests, that Grenell might “decamp from Romney to Obama” should that latter come out in favor of federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Does he really think gay people are so shallow that we’d back a candidate just because he has a better record on gay issues even when we disagree with him on nearly every other issue?

That social conservative, a Mr. Matthew J. Franck, reports Jennifer Rubin, had written:

Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?

Well, Mr. Obama didn’t wait until the Democratic National Convention. And in his appeal earlier this month for gay campaign cash, the Democrat did just what Mr. Franck imagined he might do.

And Mr. Grenell? Well, the headline for CNN’s report on his editorial yesterday in the Wall Street Journal says it all, Former Romney spox Grenell: Don’t vote on gay marriage:

He said that Romney’s position on same-sex marriage – which Grenell disagrees with – was not enough to write him off as a candidate.

“Like many voters, I rarely agree with a candidate’s every position,” Grenell wrote. “I can support Mr. Romney for president but not agree with all of his stated policies. (more…)

More on this anon.

“To repeat a point I made last night,” writes Allahpundit, if the Romney team “muzzled” Richard “Grenell to show social conservatives that they disapprove of gays, they’re going about the aftermath in an awfully funny way.”  That blogger reports that Romney and a top aide reiterated that they had wanted Grenell to stay.  (The post merits your time and he provides video clips of both men.)

Jennifer Rubin quotes the presumptive Republican nominee himself as saying that his team “wanted him to stay with our team. He’s a very accomplished spokesperson, and we select people not based upon their ethnicity or their sexual preference or their gender but upon their capability.”  Emphasis added.

Unlike yours truly who has blogged on this topic as a gay conservative, trying to imagine what it might be like for one of our number to go through what Grenell been going through, Rubin has actually talked to “many players involved” and has learned . . .

. . .  that Grenell was getting flak principally from the far right[*], but also from the left challenging how a gay man in favor of gay marriage could work for a conservative (on foreign policy, mind you) whose position is the same as the president’s (neither is in favor of gay marriage). He perceived the Romney camp was keeping him out of sight. The Romney camp thought it was successfully calming the waters, and senior officials may have been only dimly aware of the angst Grenell was going through.

. . . .

But Grenell was right. He had become the story. If Romney or Fehrnstrom had said what they did today before Grenell quit, he might have been understandably reassured. But the firestorm wouldn’t have ended, as we see from a new round of speculation and stories.

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing.  Only dimly aware of what Grenell was going through.  Sometimes, we do forget that people in the public eye have feelings. (Lends credence to my notion of the personal toll this might have been (was?) taking on him.)  No matter how strong you think you are, no matter how thick your skin, attacks in public fora do sting, particularly the first time you hear them.  It takes time to learn to distances yourself from some of the nastiness prevalent today in our political discourse.

Campaign officials may just not have been aware of the angst caused by the vitriol coming from a handful of extreme social conservatives.

* (more…)

As I wrote yesterday, I can often tell just from checking the spam filter when we’ve been linked by a left-wing site; the number of hate comments increases. And on occasion, when a conservative blog links us, we’ll see a slight uptick in the number of nasty comments from social conservatives.  (The last I counted the hate e-mails I receive, the former outnumbered the latter by a margin of about 19 to 1.)

There seems to be a link between gay conservatives gaining attention in the blogosphere and our volume of mean-spirited commentary.

This all caused me to wonder if maybe Richard Grenell experienced the same sort of thing, an increase in the volume of hate mail from angry left-wing gays and extreme social conservatives, hence his observation that “my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.”

Just a hunch, but one rooted in our experiences as gay conservative bloggers.

As I blogged earlier today, in writing about the Grenell matter, the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward understood the delicate balance of the conservative coalition.  Given that social conservatives, who represent a key part of the Republican base, remained suspect of the presumptive nominee, his “campaign had to tread carefully in defending its hiring of a man who was not only openly gay but who also had agitated publicly for Obama to reverse his opposition to gay marriage.”

This perhaps explains why the campaign was wary of having Grenell speak in a recent conference call on national security.  They perhaps wanted to take a cautious (too cautious and counterproductive in my view) approach to rolling out Grenell, fearing they might otherwise antagonize social conservatives.

Yet, no matter what you do, certain social conservative leaders just won’t be satisfied.  (A few, but not all, just have this need to feel aggrieved.)  In this case, they decided to create an issue where there was none.  The Romney team had tapped Grenell as a spokesman on foreign policy and national security matters, not to advise the candidate on social issues.  And on such (national security) matters, Grenell had a record entirely in the mainstream of American conservatism.

To that end, a statement might not only have reassured Grenell, but also rank-and-file social conservatives (most, less intransigent than their leaders).

The campaign could have offered that they were delighted to have Grenell on board, given his experience and expertise in national security matters, but understood that the incoming spokesman and the candidate had differences on state recognition of same-sex marriage.  ”We welcome Republicans of all stripes to our team, even if we do not agree with them on all issues,” adding, “As Ronald Reagan said, ‘The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.‘” (more…)

Lost in all the hullabaloo over Richard Grenell’s resignation from the Romney campaign are the actual words of his statement announcing his decision:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

Emphasis added.  Some of the left have used this story as a cudgel with which to bash conservatives, but they ignore the strong critique this openly gay man offered of Obama’s foreign policy, who cited its many failures and faulted the president’s weak leadership.

And this openly gay man made clear that his sexuality was not an issue to the Romney team.

Perhaps, the Romney team blundered in handling the issue, but, if they did, they did not do so out of animus against gay people.

It is very clear that the presumptive Republican nominee’s top aides (and apparently the candidate himself) very much wanted this highly qualified man on their team.

Others may try to spin this story to fit it into their narrative of an anti-gay GOP, but when you consider Grenell’s words — and the statements of top officials in the Romney campaign — the facts just don’t fit the narrative.  Anti-gay leaders tend not praise openly openly gay individuals.

Instead of looking for some sinister motive in all this, let’s focus instead on those foreign policy failures–and that weak leadership.

In all the pieces I read yesterday on the Grenell matter, three stand out, with Jennifer Rubin’s The lesson of the Grenell episode leading the pack.

The Huffington Post reporter Jon Ward, surprisingly enough, pretty accurately (and succinctly) summarized the tensions between Romney and social conservatives*:

Because of his Mormon faith and some moderate positions on social issues, Romney has never been popular with the conservative evangelical base of the Republican Party. Many conservatives say they will still vote for Romney because they so strongly oppose President Barack Obama. But this amounts to a fragile alliance between Romney and these voters.

So the Romney campaign had to tread carefully in defending its hiring of a man who was not only openly gay but who also had agitated publicly for Obama to reverse his opposition to gay marriage.

And on HotAir, Allahpundit denies that this was “some sort of anti-gay purge,” given that “Team Romney continues to praise Grenell publicly”:

. . . if this is . Here’s [Romney senior adviser Dan] Senor saying the campaign was lucky to have him and yesterday campaign manager Matt Rhoades issued a statement insisting that “We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill.” If you’re trying to placate social conservatives who object to Grenell’s hiring, that’s an odd way to do it.

Said blogger also addresses the issue of whether “Grenell was being kept ‘under wraps’ by the campaign”. I remain dubious of that claim, in part, because of the biases of those with access to the source (CNN, Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan), but primarily because it doesn’t make sense.  As Allahpundit puts it:

Why try to turn down the heat over Grenell’s hiring by making him lie low when you could have turned him loose as an attack dog against Obama and won conservatives over that way? (more…)

Had a reader not alerted me to Andrew Sullivan’s post excerpting my first post on Richard Grenell’s resignation, I might not have seen the link.  In his post, Andrew quotes me generously and acknowledged the challenges gay conservatives face:

I’ve only ever been a gay conservative (never a Republican), and back in the 1990s, it was brutal living in the gay world and challenging liberal assumptions. I cannot imagine the social isolation of Grenell in Los Angeles today, doing what he did.

Yes, it is brutal living in the gay world and challenging liberal assumptions, but a lot less so today, in large part due to Andrew’s own pioneering iconoclasm and his courage in standing up in the 1990s and into the 2000s to the gay bullies, continuing to speak out even as they vilified him.  We follow in his footsteps on the path he helped clear.

That said, Andrew goes to offer in trying to blame the whole mess on Republicans by the parting shot he offers at the end:  ”I mean: what do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage?”  The response he offers is not a pretty one.

Given that the Romney campaign expressed regret at Grenell’s departure and given the evidence that top aides to the former Massachusetts governor asked Grenell to change his mind and remain on the campaign — even enlisting conservative leaders in that effort — it seems that Republicans didn’t smear this supremely qualified foreign policy spokesman as Andrew suggests.  Quite to the contrary.  In making such an effort to keep him on the campaign, they showed how much they valued his experience and particular skill-set.

Instead of smearing an entire political party, Andrew should instead direct his fire at the handful of social conservatives who raised a ruckus at the appointment.  The Romney campaign may have handled this matter in a clumsy fashion, but they didn’t demonstrate any animus against a qualified individual because of his sexuality.

Andrew recalls the brutality of those who dared challenge the liberal orthodoxy.  He should not become like them and define an entire political party by its most extreme elements.

In most, but fortunately not all coverage of what John Podhoretz dubbed L’Affaire Grenell, various pundits and pontificators have attempted to discern some anti-gay prejudice or crass pusillanimity within the Republican Party in general and the Romney campaign in particular.

In doing so, most lose sight of the basic facts of the situation which, Jennifer Rubin who first broke the story, reported in her last update to her post on the matter:

Right Turn has learned from multiple sources that the senior officials from the Romney campaign and respected Republicans not on the campaign contacted Ric Grenell over the weekend in an attempt to persuade him not to leave the campaign. Those were unsuccessful.

Despite social conservatives’ criticism of the appointment, the Romney team wanted to keep Grenell on board.

It seems that the real reason Grenell stepped down was the one he articulated in his statement:

While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.

Emphasis added.  As Podhoretz put it, the former John Bolton aide “was evidently rattled by attacks from the Right on his fitness for his post.”  And not just the right.  Scanning the Facebook comments of my liberal friends who posted on the matter, it seems he experienced attacks from the left as well for his choice words mocking leading liberals.

Grenell, Podhoretz suggests, “decided he didn’t need the grief”.  One wonders if he, used to flacking for others, was just not comfortable — or not prepared — to become the story himself.

And that rather than being a story with large implications, this may simply be the story of a man who wants his private life to remain private.

More on this anon.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Replying to this comment, “Romney WANTED / NEEDED a token gay person in his campaign”, Rattlesnake quips, “Or, maybe he just hired him for his qualifications.”

One of the great gifts of blogging is the civil feedback and criticism I receive in e-mails from our readers.  On numerous occasions, they have alerted me to flaws in my arguments or pointed out a wrinkle in an issue I cover in a post.  Such was the case yesterday when a gay reader somewhat sympathetic to social conservatives sent me a message, linking an article about l’affiare Grenell and indicating, among his concerns about the erstwhile almost Romney foreign policy spokesman, objections to his tweets attacking conservative women:

Please remember that Grenell had to delete 800 (yes 800) tweets that trashed female conservative women. Many of those tweets are publicized online in a simple google search. He claimed they were tongue and cheek, but the sheer number in a short period of time alarmed me, and many of these tweets were directed at conservatives such as Newt & Callista Gingrich.

Indeed, I had heard these criticisms before. But, Grenell did, as McKay Coppins BuzzFeed reports, apologize for those tweets. Coppins mused that “If the campaign was slow to come to Grenell’s public defense over his sexuality, his embarrassing Tweets may have had something to do with it.”

Do wonder if the criticism of Grenell would have gained any traction had he chosen to mince his words about his fellow Republicans.

His outspoken advocacy of gay marriage may also have hurt him.  Byron York reports that he criticized. . .

Jonathan Capehart, an opinion writer for the Washington Post who is gay, for attending a state dinner at the Obama White House but not using the opportunity to confront President Obama over Obama’s opposition to gay marriage. (more…)

Just learned that Richard Grenell, the Romney campaign’s foreign policy spokesman has stepped down.  And also learned that he “was in the process of moving from Los Angeles to Boston.”  Didn’t know he was out here.  Although we are both gay conservatives, our paths have not crossed.

According to Jennifer Rubin who broke the story, Grenell issued this statement earlier today:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

It is unfortunate that certain social conservatives made much of Grenell’s sexuality.   Rubin finds that Romney camp’s expression of disappointment on the resignation serves as “a subtle retort to those calling for Grenell’s head, that he was not hired to advise on gay issues but on foreign policy matters.”  Emphasis added.   (Read the whole thing.)

Just because you hire a gay man for a job doesn’t mean you support the agenda of the left-wing gay groups.

And just because Grenell shares Mitt Romney’s foreign policy goals doesn’t mean the two men see eye to eye on every issue.  It is thus absurd to think that, as one social conservative quoted in Rubin’s piece suggests, that Grenell might “decamp from Romney to Obama” should that latter come out in favor of federal recognition of same-sex marriage.  Does he really think gay people are so shallow that we’d back a candidate just because he has a better record on gay issues even when we disagree with him on nearly every other issue?

Rubin reports that the Romney campaign wanted to keep him on.

Media coverage, however, made Grenell’s personal life rather than his experience and foreign policy credentials the focus in stories about his appointment.  Thus, not just social conservatives who are to blame.  The media are also to blame for sensationalizing this.

That said, social conservatives’ choice to focus on an aspect of Grenell’s private life irrelevant to his capacity to serve must have made this a trying time for this supremely qualified conservative. (more…)

Consistent with conservative principles as articulated by the Republican Party at least since its founding — and particularly in the post-Civil War era as well as in the last third of the preceding century (roughly synchronous with the rise of Ronald Reagan), we should favor laws which do not distinguish based on race, religion, sexual orientation or any other similar factor differentiating one human being from another.

We shouldn’t ask government to sanction our sexual orientation, but do ask that it not condemn it.  We don’t need validation from the state to live freely.  And it is not warranted for the state to punish us for our difference — nor for acting upon our sexual/emotional longings for affection and intimacy.

We ask simply to be treated as human beings with each individual retaining the right to determine his destiny.

And by not asking for privileges based on our difference, we make clearer our commitment to freedom (and indeed to the ideal of equality under the law), to the state leaving each man, each woman alone to determine his, to determine her own destiny.  At the same time, we reaffirm the principles which have made this nation great, have made it strong and made it a shining example for those seeking freedom from oppressive regimes and seeking to replace such regimes with more equitable administrations.

In short, by not asking for anything from the government, we lead by example, reminding all Americans that we don’t need favors from the state in order to seek out opportunities, fulfill our own destines and pursue our own happiness, on our own or together with individuals with whom we choose to associate as part of groups we choose to join.

More on this anon.

NB: Tweaked the text to make it a bit bolder.

Perhaps the greatest satisfaction — and the greatest disappointment — of blogging comes from the comments section.  There, I find that my posts often stimulate great discussion, provide interesting information or allow for general amusement.  (But, too often they descend into name-calling, with ad hominem attacks replacing civil discourse, attacking those offering opposing points of view rather than challenging their arguments.)

In two recent posts, we have seen the former, with a good exchange throughout to thread following my Marriott post as well as in a few comments (following the third such posting) to my government fairness post. Via the former thread, I learned that one blogger thought Mitt Romney’s appointment of former John Bolton aide Richard Grenell to be some kind of “outreach” to gay Republicans.  It was no such thing.  Nor should we want it to have been.

As most of you have heard by now, Romney tapped Grenell to be his campaign’s “national security and foreign policy spokesman”.  Grenell, as Roger Simon reminds us, is “openly gay.”  He appears to be well-qualified for the job, having been . . .

. . . a longtime spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. He was known by the press as a loyal, and combative, appointee to a series of ambassadors including John Bolton, to whom he remains close. He also fought a long, and unsuccessful battle for formal recognition of his partner in diplomatic documents.

His qualifications, however, haven’t prevented one extreme social conservative from losing his cool:  ”Bryan Fischer, the director of issue analysis for the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association called the appointment “a ‘message to the pro-family community’ of ‘drop dead.’”  Seems some extreme social conservatives oftentimes mimic leftists.  Once again, this was no such thing.  It was merely the appointment of a qualified man to an important campaign position.  Grenell’s sexuality likely had nothing to do with the appointment.

Nor should we gay Republicans want it to have a factor in Romney’s choice.

We should not want the presumptive Republican nominee — nor any politician — to appoint a man merely because he’s gay, but instead should want him to appoint men and women to posts of responsibility in his campaign — and administration — primarily because they are qualified — and regardless of their sexuality (or any other difference irrelevant to their capacity to serve).  In short, an individual’s sexuality should not be the reason for nor an impediment to his appointment.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Louise B offers a good case for pointing out that Mr. Grenell is gay: “To me, a social conservative, the only reason to point out a foreign policy man is homosexual is that it tells the Muslim countries to stop killing their citizens because they contribute to the society as a whole.”

ANOTHER FROM THE COMMENTS:  Bookworm love smy “post caption, because it completely sums up the fact that people should be viewed as individuals — capable or incapable, smart or dumb, good or bad, etc. — first. You’ve cleverly captured the core meaning in King’s ‘I have a dream speech.’”  Aw shucks, Thanks.

I expect to have more to say about Rick Santorum’s withdrawal next week, particularly as it impacts the role of gay Republicans in the GOP — and the party’s emerging attitude toward gays.  I had begun that discussion this post.  As part of that conversation, I highly recommend Alana Goodman’s Commentary post about the GOP Shift on Gay Marriage Opposition.  Goodman considers an issue I’d been meaning to address about the National Organization for Marriage (yes, rusty, that’s the post I indicated here that intended to write) which helps show one trend I’d been meaning to consider.

Alas, that by the time I (expect to) get to this post, the (Santorum) story may no longer be fresh, but other obligations take precedence.  The day Santorum dropped out, I was flying to New York (moving a planned trip up a day early for family reasons) and will be “back east” (as we in California call this part of the country) until early next week, with meetings in western Massachusetts (the reason for the trip) in the coming days.

That said, I do want to share with you something blogger Ed Morrissey, who had back Santorum “with some heavy qualifications” said about Romney wrapping up the nomination:

Mitt Romney is the nominee.  He won the nomination through hard work and good organization, but his competition forced him to improve his performance along the way.  The sooner we put fantasies of brokered conventions and one-on-one debates between Republicans — which will only serve as media fodder to attack the GOP — the better we will begin to prepare for the real goal of this process, which is to make Barack Obama a one-term President.  With that goal in mind, I plan to caucus for Romney in the upcoming CD and state Republican conventions in Minnesota and work to unite the party behind its nominee.  However, I also plan to support candidates in the House and Senate that will ensure that a President Romney governs as a conservative, as Donald Devine advises post-Santorum.

I share this because Morrissey, as usual, offers a good summary of the situation and often seems to have his finger on the pulse of conservative sentiment.
(more…)

On Thursday, Tina Korbe helped lay the ground work for  series of posts as I have been planning on gays, the GOP and the current presidential election.  In a post where she took issue with former Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean’s mean-spirited anti-Republican rant, which I excerpted and linked here, she articulated a preference for the Republican appeal to the “whole person” over the Democrats’ pandering to the differences which divide us.

And so it is, in some ways, for gay Republicans.  We may not like that our party has yet to embrace even state recognition of same-sex civil unions, but we are put off by the Democrats’ patronizing approach.  We recognize that there are larger issues at stake than same-sex unions, particularly a president unwilling to address a federal debt than has increased by a greater amount in the past three years and two months than it had in the preceding eight.

Now, expect to hear increasingly harsh rhetoric attacking the GOP not just for the Democrat-declared war on women, but also for its hostility to people like us who differ from the societal norm.  Democrats aren’t doing this just to keep gays voting Democratic, but they’re also seeking to appeal to straight suburban voters who have gay friends — or who are just uncomfortable with anti-gay rhetoric; such suburban voters may not be pro-gay per se, but do tend to be anti-anti-gay.

I endorsed Jon Huntsman for President in part because of his, as I put it three months ago, “solid statement on civil unions” in the ABC News /Yahoo!/WMUR-TV New Hampshire Republican primary debate.  Although he thought marriage should be “saved for one man and one woman,” he also advocated “reciprocal beneficiary rights [as] part of civil unions”, encouraging states “to talk about this.”

His answer was much better than that of Mitt Romney, now the likely Republican nominee.  Still, that former Massachusetts governor did offer a most decent reply which, for the purpose of this post and my intended series, I quote in full.  He recognizes the capacity of gay people to form loving and lasting couples and even parent children.  He shows no animus against people like us.  He, like the man he seeks to replace, just believes marriage to be a union between individuals of different sexes.

In response to Diane Sawyer’s question how he would respond to a gay couple sitting down in his living room and asking about the right “to form loving, committed, long-term relationships”, he began by praising couples:

Well, the answer is, is that’s a wonderful thing to do, and that there’s every right for people in this country to form long- term committed relationships with one another. That doesn’t mean that they have to call it marriage or they have to receive the — the approval of the state and a marriage license and so forth for that to occur. (more…)

“Occasionally,” writes Tina Korbe, a woman who feels Howard Dean’s party patronizes those of her sex

. . . Democrats give me the distinct impression that their positions on, say, gay marriage or immigration are based more on the desire to win votes than cohesive principles. It’s suspicious, for example, that the president’s official position is against gay marriage but “evolving.” It’s almost as though he’s just waiting for an overwhelming majority of Americans to be in favor of gay marriage before he switches his position. Reducing gays, Muslims, Latinos, immigrants and women to their concerns over gay-specific, Muslim-specific, Latino-specific, immigrant-specific and women-specific positions reduces them to something less than a whole, entire, complex person. But no person is reducible to the tiniest sliver of himself — his sexuality, his religion, his ethnicity, his immigrant status, his gender. We all care — broadly — about human flourishing. That’s what Republicans want — a prosperous, flourishing, fully human society.

She says this in response to former chair of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean who, in his latest rant, accused the GOP of engaging in “Gay-bashing, Muslim-bashing, Latino-bashing, immigrant-bashing, women-bashing every day”. Sounds like he got his information from the left-wing blogs which supported his 2004 bid for the White Rather rather than from actual interaction with actual Republicans.

Korbe acknowledges she “cannot speak for gays, Muslims, Latinos or immigrants”, but she contends that as a woman, she has

. . . found the Democratic Party’s approach to my vote far less loving and far more insulting than the Republican Party’s approach to that vote. While Democrats reduce me to nothing more than my sexuality and assume that I cannot even pay for my own birth control, Republicans appeal to me as a whole person, to my ability to take personal responsibility for myself, to work hard, to reap the benefits of my labors and to voluntarily share those benefits with whose who truly aren’t able to be responsible for themselves.

Well, Tina, you speak for me.  And, I would dare say, for a good number of our blog readers.   (more…)

There comes a moment in the lives of most gay conservative when the outrage we feel at intolerant attitudes toward and mean-spirted reaction to our politics becomes amusement at the narrow-mindedness and short-sightedness of our left-of-center gay peers unable to understand the ideas of their ideological adversaries.  I receive reports on a near daily basis from gay Republican peers about Facebook “friends” “defriending” them for daring to disagree with their opinions of the president — or registering their own as Republicans.

Not to mention the nasty response we often hear when we offer opinions at odd with gay orthodoxy.  And sometimes we don’t even need identify ourselves as gay Republicans to experience the hatred some gay liberals feel for gay conservatives.  Just yesterday, I quipped that we “must always be suspicious of anyone who spends his life defining himself by what he is not — or making much of those he dislikes” in response to a liberal friend’s link to a blog post about an “ex-gay” video.

Shortly after my comment, a gay liberal chimed in, “self loathing gay men [Log Cabin?] are a bit strange!”  Another would offer (all caps in original, “REPUBLICAN –GAY = OXYMORON…OR IS IT JUST MORON? I FORGET.”

Do wonder why these guys hate so much.  And wonder as well if some of them have joined campaigns against H8, i.e., those opposing state recognition of same-sex marriage.

You look at these people, smile in amusement at their smallness, shake your head and feel sorry for them — for lacking the capacity to realize that someone can have different opinions from their own for sound reasons — and without harboring sinister motives.

About 20 minutes ago, received an e-mail from an acquaintance, parroting a liberal talking point, telling me that extremists had taken over the GOP.  Not long after that, opened an e-mail providing evidence showing a much more tolerant party.

In the latter, Scott Schmidt reported that “the Republican Party of Los Angeles County and the California Republican Party” had endorsed West Hollywood small business owner Brad Torgan. . . .  Torgan is only one of seventeen non-incumbent candidates for the State Assembly to receive the State Party’s nod before the June 5, 2012 election.  The endorsement will be published alongside the Candidate’s name on the sample ballot sent to voters before the election.”

Oh, and Brad Torgan is gay.

And he supports the unifying small government principles which bring together most Republicans, heralding the endorsement with these word, “I will fight for limited government, fundamental freedoms and cleaning up Sacramento not because those are Republican values, but because they are what the people of the fiftieth district, and the State of California, are asking for.”

Sounds like the kind of guy I can support.  And for whom I will most definitely be voting.  (This is my district after all.)