Writing about experiences similar to those our readers have reported, the gay blogger at ProtoType tells how a friend how has supported “an anti-gay marriage campaign” often welcomes him and his partner into their home, treating them in a friendly manner, then offers:

Pretty much without exception, I have found it markedly easier to be openly gay in conservative social groups, than openly conservative in liberal social groups.

When it becomes known you’re conservative in a liberal social group, faces often go from friendly to neutral and nonplussed. Often, someone will outright challenge you: “How can you possibly…?” The unconcealed emotions are ones of disgust (like at a bad smell) mixed with a sort of bemusement at the bizarre eccentricity of it.

Emphasis added.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  (Read the whole thing.)

These folks claim to be “tolerant toward everyone”, well, except those they deem “stupid, ignorant, crazy, racist, homophobic, greedy, xenophobic, misogynist, or hateful.”  They do tend to affix those labels to individuals offering a political viewpoint different from their own.

Interesting that blogger’s observation that certain liberals don’t even make an effort to conceal the disgust they feel toward political conservatives.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Carol observes that “The ones hollering for ‘tolerance’ are always the most intolerant people in the crowd. Hypocrisy on parade.”

Many of you have read before about the New Mexico case where a lesbian couple filed a discrimination claim against a Christian photographer who refused to photograph their commitment ceremony.

When the two women filed their claim, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission found against the photographer and ordered the company “to pay $6,600 in attorney fees.”  Said photographer, Elaine Huguenin, reported George Will in his column on Friday . . .

. . . says that she is being denied her right to the “free exercise” of religion guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and a similar provision in the New Mexico Constitution. Furthermore, New Mexico’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act defines “free exercise” as “an act or a refusal to act that is substantially motivated by religious belief” and forbids government from abridging that right except to “further a compelling government interest.”

As New Mexico’s Supreme Court prepares to sort this out, Will offers how the cases . . .

. . . demonstrates how advocates of tolerance become tyrannical. First, a disputed behavior, such as sexual activities between people of the same sex, is declared so personal and intimate that government should have no jurisdiction over it. Then, having won recognition of what Louis Brandeis, a pioneer of the privacy right, called “the right to be let alone,” some who have benefited from this achievement assert a right not to let other people alone. It is the right to coerce anyone who disapproves of the now-protected behavior into acting as though they approve of it, or at least into not acting on their disapproval. (more…)

I’ve arrived in Tampa and am now blogging from an awesome panel featuring some of the most powerful women in the Conservative movement.

This panel features Townhall.com editor and author Katie Pavlich, US Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, US Rep. Renee Ellmers and Breitbart Editor Dana Loesch.

The format is interesting… clips demeaning Republican women are shown (many are from Bill Maher, shockingly…). Then the panelists respond to the clips and the overall insulting way the media treats Conservative women.

It is a great panel to start the convention for me. All of these women are smart and accomplished and many have had to overcome great professional and professional odds.

Kudos to the organizers of this panel. It is an important topic and very empowering to hear our strong Conservative women stand up for their values and our nation.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Remember all the handwringing in the media about Mitt Romney’s continued association with Donald Trump even as the presumptive Republican nominee made clear he disagreed with the celebrity entrepreneur’s continuing commentary on the president’s birth certificate?  Yahoo! even included a headline (in its top news) about Romney’s refusal to tell Trump to dial it down.

Aaron Sorkin speculates what would happen if Romney told anti-gay activists to “drop dead.”  Others faulted the Republican candidates for not repudiating a solitary boor who booed a gay service member.

Now, with gay left activists taking pictures of themselves flipping off former presidents while in the White House at the incumbent’s invitation, will those very voices in our legacy media call on the president to (borrowing and paraphrasing an expression) differentiate himself from the boorish behavior of his guests, individuals he invited to the White House?

What would the media reaction be if social conservatives had photographed themselves flipping off pictures of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter while visiting the White House?  (Well, don’t think social conservatives would conduct themselves in such a manner.)

Gay groups should join us in condemning these antics.  These people do not provide an image of gay people that should gain currency in the media.  Such juvenile behavior should not be representative of our community.  We should look instead to people as Mary Cheney as Heather Poe as role models.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Haven’t had time to review all the comments.  Shortly after posting this, I headed up to take my nephew to some sites, including, of all places, the Reagan Library (where I honored the Gipper and renewed my membership).  midwest mama does get at the implications of these juvenile antics.

I am a middle-aged straight woman from Kansas. If it weren’t for my gay relatives, whom I love to pieces, the only picture I would have of the gay community is the “in your face” people who seem to not be able to get over their sexuality and insist that if I don’t absolutely embrace every possible permutation of the gay lifestyle, I am somehow a hater. I am willing to live and let live, but it seems to me that a lot of people in the gay community are not. I appreciate knowing there are gay conservatives out there.

If the folks at HRC, GLAAD et al are truly concerned about improving the image of gay Americans, they will denounce these antics and call on the president to repudiate them as well.

UPDATE:  The White House has criticized these antics:

“While the White House does not control the conduct of guests at receptions, we certainly expect that all attendees conduct themselves in a respectful manner. Most all do,” Shin Inouye, a White House spokesman, said. “These individuals clearly did not. Behavior like this doesn’t belong anywhere, least of all in the White House.”

Et tu, HRC?  Et tu, NGLTF?

“What Happens,” asks Victor Fiorello of the Philly Post, “When You Let Gay Philly Activists Into the White House”?

They pose for pics giving Ronald Reagan’s portait the finger.

Guess they forgot about the ads that good man cut to oppose the anti-gay Briggs Amendment.

What a great way to create an image of gay people as responsible adults.  Via Weekly Standard via Drudge.

It’s not just Dan Savage.  Another left-of-center Obama supporter has offered a prejudiced view of gay conservatives.

In response to GOProud’s endorsement of Mitt Romney, Joe Behar wondered if “the GOProud guys are just attracted to Mitt Romney’s sons Matt, Mutt, Tag, Tip, Tack, and Bashful“. “Does Joy“, asks our reader Greg who alerted me to this story. . .

. . . really believe that gay men only think with their penises? And the stereotyping of gay men as mincing enthusiasts of Broadway musicals is pretty “out there” as well. Such claims from a conservative would be equally offensive — and would be the basis for the same sort of outrage that a Dan Savage type comment from a conservative would be.

Will gay groups take Mrs. Behar to task for her prejudiced assumption about the attitudes of this subset of the gay community?  So far I can’t find anything on the web-pages of HRC or NGLTF.  Nor do they have anything about Mr. Savage’s “hateful remarks” (borrowing the term HRC used when Sarah Palin’s daughter called some a “f***ot”.)

Does it even occur to Behar that gay people, like most Americans consider a great variety of factors when choosing a political candidate to support?

Dan Savage was at it again today… he just can’t accept individual thought. If you aren’t a left-wing gay radical, you are a faggot.

Well, Mr. Savage… let’s review the record and remind folks who the true bully is.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan): Do wonder if HRC will call Mr. Savage on the carpet for his use of the term “faggot.” They faulted Sarah Palin when her daughter used the term.

Here at GayPatriot, we have considered one of the most unreported stories in the legacy media — the liberal intolerance of gay conservatives.  Heck, even the gay organization which prides itself on taking action when “media is [sic] used as a platform to defame and stereotype LGBT people” honored a mean-spirited blogger who uses his web-site to defame and stereotype gay conservatives.

It’s not just gay conservatives who face verbal attacks and — as John Hawkins reported earlier this week  – worse.  Some on the left, he reminds us, have moved beyond verbal attacks, citing “the staggering level of abuse that many activists, columnists, and bloggers on the Right have to endure just to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

John mentions not just the recent “SWAT-ing”** of prominent conservative bloggers, but also other forms of harassment, including hacking politicians’ e-mail boxes and bloggers’ twitter accounts while attacking conservative speakers.  Some activists have even contacted bloggers’ places of employment and posted their addresses online.

Some at GayPatriot are familiar with one of these tactics.

The real issue here is not just the tactics, but why the legacy media have chosen not to cover this phenomenon.

——

*in the legacy media.

**”That means someone called the police, claimed to be the person in question, and told them he had killed someone. The idea is to agitate the police and send them to the target’s house where they’ll hopefully kill the victim before they figure out what’s going on.”

Every now and again, when a social conservative garners headlines for an anti-gay rant, a reader will e-mail me (or offer a comment) asking why I didn’t cover it — or, in a less civil manner, suggesting that my silence indicates an indifference to right-wing animus.

My basic response to such inquiries is simple:  (1) other blogs and news sites already cover that story and (2) I just don’t have time to cover every topic of concern.

Moreover, we try to cover the stories that aren’t covered — particularly one story of concern to gay Republicans and conservatives that the media, even the gay media, seem intent on ignoring.  As I put it yesterday in my post on civility:

My most recent post on the Grenell matter should have been an occasion for our readers to consider yet again the most unreported story in the gay media  – and indeed a social phenomenon that only receives passing notice even in the conservative press, that of the of strong intolerance among certain liberals toward people like us, gay conservatives.

Richard Grenell observed that “Some of the most hateful, mean-spirited intolerant comments about me being the foreign policy and national security spokesman for Governor Romney … were coming from the left.”  (Emphasis added.)

Now, whenever we bring up this topic, some of our liberal readers will accuse us of whining.  Does that mean then that they’re whining when they point to anti-gay animus among social conservatives?

We see the media reporting stories of that animus, but where pray tell, do we see stories about anti-gay conservative animus among the supposedly enlightened set?

UPDATE:  GOProud Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia passes on these reports of his organization standing up to the left-wing intolerance described above.

They’ll tolerate you as long as you don’t deviate from their orthodoxy.

–James Taranto, Best of the Web, May 17, 2012

Due to the bigoted, bullying, anti-Christian tirade of the Obama Administration’s partner in “anti-bullying”….

…this blog has had its highest traffic in 2 years.

BWAHAHAHA.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I just noticed this quote from Savage’s wild-eyed bullying tirade…

“There is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding nights if they’re not virgins — at least not yet,” Savage said. “We don’t know where the GOP is going these days.”

“People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle,” he said. “They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible — about homosexuality.

If I didn’t know better, I would think he was criticizing Islamic governments around the world that routinely stone women & hang gays NOW. I don’t recall an American government official doing anything of the sort in at least 50 years. And back then, it would have most likely been a Democrat.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Released in the last hour… GOPROUD condemns Dan Savage.

Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud Executive Director – “Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts – not helps – the fight for gay rights in this country.”

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, GOProud – a national organization of gay and straight Americans seeking to promote freedom by supporting free markets, limited government, and a respect for individual rights, condemned a speech given by left wing gay activist Dan Savage. “Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts – not helps – the fight for gay rights in this country,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud Executive Director. “There is nothing incompatible between being a Christian and believing that all people should be treated equally, and Dan Savage’s attacks on Christianity only fuel those on the extremist fringe who oppose gay rights.”

“Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance who he called ‘pansy-asses,’” continued LaSalvia. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.”

“GOProud works with people of faith every single day – gay and straight. We believe strongly that people of faith should be treated with respect,” concluded LaSalvia.

Bravo.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

This morning I was greeted with a message from someone on Twitter I had never heard of before.

Here is her Twitter profile.

And here was her lovely message to me….

I hope my Mom… or hers…. doesn’t read this posting. 

Classy.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his monologue yesterday, Rush Limbaugh reflected on a theme which John Podhoretz considered in his column on the Supreme Court arguments over Obamacare and, as I put it yesterday, “the failure of all too many in the chattering classes to appreciate the merits of conservative arguments“.

On the astonished reaction of liberals to the poor arguments the administration made before the Supreme Court in defense of the president’s signature initiative, the talker explained:

It’s eye-opening.  I really want to be serious about this.  They’re a bunch of overhyped know-nothings who do not have an expansive view of the world.  They’re in a prison that’s created by their own conceit.  They’re in a prison that’s the result of their own arrogance and they live in a place where there is no reality.

. . . .

Now, let me go through some of Hayward’s piece here to try to be illustrative of what I’m talking about.  “The Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Month for the Left.”[*]  I’m not gonna read the whole thing.  I’m gonna take excerpts here.  “It is typical for politically engaged people to note the weaknesses and defects of their own side…” No, that’s what’s remarkable; they don’t.  There are no weaknesses. There are no defects, until they’re confronted with them.  They do not conceive them. (Continuing reading excerpt) “…while overestimating the strength and prowess of their opponents.”  That’s us.  That’s what we have always done, and hopefully no more.  There’s no reason to ever feel inferior to these people.  There’s no reason to grant them superior or elite status in any way.

Via Powerline picks.  And Rush invites the question:  why do some on the left refuse to acknowledge the weaknesses in their own arguments?  Or the merits of their opponents’?

* (more…)

In the New York Post today, John Podhoretz has a great piece which, in looking at some liberal commentators’ reaction to the Supreme Court arguments over Obamacare, considers the failure of all too many in the chattering classes to appreciate the merits of conservative arguments:

The panicked reception in the mainstream media of the three-day Supreme Court health-care marathon is a delightful reminder of the nearly impenetrable parochialism of American liberals.

They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.

Read the whole thing, and as you do, ponder why all too many in the chattering classes so regularly dismiss the intelligence of conservatives and the merits of our arguments.

Via Powerline picks.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, it does seem that conservatives are more tolerant of their friends with opposing political points of view than liberals.  We may have anecdotal evidence for that notion, but can’t regularly confirm that hypothesis with actual scientific data.  Well, today, we have some data to work with.

The “Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project posed a series of questions about people’s general use of SNS [Social networking sites] for politics and about the ways in which they interact with friends on the sites over political material. One goal of the survey was to see if people are using the sites in a way that suggests they live in social network “echo chambers” of like-minded friends.”  And what they found confirmed our hypothesis:

Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.

Introducing the study, Ed Morrissey (to whom I tip my hat for this story), quipped “Superior liberal tolerance is such a fact that they will scream at you if you dare to disagree or debate them, demand that your advertisers bail on you, and pressure the FCC to get you banned from the airwaves.”  The 2010 CPAC blogger of the year also quotes Andrew Malcolm who, as Ed puts it, “has some fun with the implications:”

Not exactly shocking news for those exposed to them for years, but the respected Pew Research Center has determined that political liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than regular Americans. (more…)

Our reader V the K linked this report about Sandra Fluke’s distaste for opposing points of view:

As a student at Cornell and treasurer of a pro-choice organization at the school, Sandra Fluke, helped shut down a pro-life speech on Cornell’s campus by counter protesting. She argued that a pro-life organization at Cornell was about “manipulating [students'] emotions” with misleading statistics about abortion.

So, if this organization offered misleading statistics, why then didn’t Ms. Fluke take it upon herself to demonstrate their inaccuracy and argue the merits of her own position?  If this story is true [and it appears it may not be*], this woman is not much interested in debating ideas, but in preventing the airing of views with which she disagrees.

In this, she has much in common with her ideological confrères in the Occupy Movement.

Just over a week ago, “unruly Occupy students at American University in Washington, D.C., shouted down Republican governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on Friday, forcing her to flee the room with aid from security guards.”  H/t:  Instapundit.

This week, they disrupted “a panel discussion [at AIPAC] led by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, FL led a discussion about Stopping Iran: Can the West End Iran’s Nuclear Drive?”

In the fall of 1964, liberal students at the University of California/Berkeley launched the “Free Speech Movement”; they wanted to end the school policy preventing student groups from operating “on campus if they engaged in any kind of off-campus politics, whether electoral, protest or even oratorical.”  Now, liberal students want to prevent their ideological adversaries from expressing their views.

They times, they are a-changing.

* (more…)

What remains striking about the LA Times Op-Ed that I linked and critiqued earlier today is that the paper’s editors chose to publish it.

Now, to be sure, its author is representative of a certain type of liberal, she is not representative of American liberals in general. Indeed, many of us on the right have left-leaning friends who hold political views similar to the columnist, yet don’t shun people merely because of their politics.  As our reader sonicfrog relates in the comments:

My partner in the duo band Taylor Martin is a Socialist… No, not the socialist lite that many consider Obama to be, but a real card carrying Socialist / Communist. And he’s not quiet about it either. He’s a political hot-head and talks about how evil capitalism is all the time. Yet, we get along just fine.

I would dare say that he’s not the only GayPatriot reader (nor indeed the only right-of-center American) to have such friends.  By the same token, many (if not most) liberals have conservative friends with whom they continue to associate (and whose company the often enjoy) despite their political differences.

With that in mind, I ask agin, “What were the Times editors thinking when they accepted this piece of publication?”  Did they want to discourage liberal readers from befriending conservatives? Did they think she could serve as a role model? Or did they just want to make excuses for their own ideological isolation, explaining away their paucity of conservative friends and associates?

In reading this woman’s piece, we can see that, boy, she does have her issues, projecting her prejudices onto conservatives, contending we lack empathy– even as she provides evidence that they are.  And saying we’re not kind.

She assumes that should her conservative neighbor fall on hard times, he might well question his feeling “that the government shouldn’t be helping anybody out” as if he had never factored bad things happening to people into his political calculus.  Many of us righties do.  And that’s why most of us donate generously to charities.  (Is she aware of surveys showing conservatives to be more generous than liberals?)

One wonders why this woman refused to take the time and attempt to empathize with her conservative neighbor.  It does seem a kind person would at least consider his neighbor’s opinions.

Sometimes you read a column by a liberal that seems it was written by a conservative to caricature his ideological adversaries. And when you realize it’s probably legitimate, you wonder at the editors who approve this piece for publication.  Are they so contained within their liberal bubble that they’re blind to how narrow their ideological confrère might comes across to someone with a broader perspective?

Such were my thoughts when I chanced upon this Op-Ed in a paper I used to receive every morning on my doorstep.  The author writes about a political argument that changed her feelings for neighbors she describes as “the best neighbors in the world. Always ready with a tool, an ingredient or a jump-start for the car. Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it. They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.”

Already there, we see her prejudice, assuming that nice people must be Democrats.

When while playing poker and drinking with the author and her spouse, the aforementioned husband, a white man married to a black woman announced that that tea party was not racist, indeed, that he was part of that dynamic grassroots movement. The argument became heated.  Insults exchanged.

The following morning, the tea party conservative came over with his wife to apologize.  His contrition, however, could not soften the hardened heart of his erstwhile hostess:

But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before. And as they headed back across the street, I saw the look they gave each other: They don’t like us anymore either.

How does she know what that look meant?  Well, we do know what she feels.  She spells it out pretty clearly

I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. (more…)