Thanks for the kind words, Miller, and excellent post. I quite agree. If a gay man is willing to sacrifice his legal equality for a tax break, he has the right to do so. But the LCRs need to stop pretending that they have any interest in “getting access for gays” in the GOP.
I don’t have a dog in this particular fight, being neither gay nor Republican (nor Democrat, for that matter), but what a few of you don’t seem to get is that stereotypes simply don’t apply across the board.
Despite the rabid hyperbole I hear from so many Democrats on the SDMB, implying that everyone who has ever voted for a Republican agrees with every single thing that every single Republican politician has ever done, few people buy 100% into their party’s platform.
Each time I select a candidate, I look at their record on the issues that I believe strongly in. I’ve yet to find a candidate who agreed with me on all of them. Sometimes, an issue becomes a deal-breaker. Several times, both the (D) and ® candidate have disagreed with me on a deal-breaker issue, which really sucks if there’s no third-party alternative.
I know a lot of Republicans who have no problems with gay rights or gay marriage, and there are a lot of Democrats at the church down the street that simply can’t deal with the idea of two men getting married.
Don’t get angry at someone because their priorities aren’t your priorities. Maybe the gay guy that’s voting Republican is a gun collector that just lost his job at the logging company because of unions and illegal aliens. Who knows?
deleted.
It was the LCR that did that? Hmm. Silly me, I thought it was the fact he lived in one of the most liberal states in the Union and that for political efficacy he was doing so due to the polls showing it was not popular and to find favor with the the millions of gays and gay friendly citizens of California (as well as perhaps the ones he worked with for 30 years in his career and will work for again when leaving office). Not to mention that Schwarzenegger is a pro-Choice Republican not at all in league with the religious right who currently have the party by the short hairs.
(Oregon politics I’ll admit I know little or nothing about and don’t particularly care to research.)
Suppose that you agreed with more of the platform of Party A than Party B, but Party A also believes that people in Montana shouldn’t have full rights of citizenship (or the right to marry or extend health benefits to their significant others, etc.) and said so specifically, and had a history of trying to belittle and disenfranchise Montanans in every way. If you voted for Party A anyway because you thought they’d lower your taxes and keep us at war, can you understand why others would pit you?
PS- I completely understand voting for gay-friendly Republicans on the state or local level- they do exist, no question. On the NATIONAL level, though- different dog. Even if they’re gay friendly they’re going to be expected to goose step in sync with their party on many issues, and most do.
I would doubt that Ronald Reagan had many more homophobia than the average Democratic politician- he’d certainly been friends with enough of them from Hollywood to Roy Cohn- but he brokered the sale of the Republicans to the Religious Right. D.C. is far too different from the state level to trust them to act for a group not powerful enough to swing an election.
Seems we’ve been through something like this not all that many decades ago. Something about Negroes or some such.
Supporting equal rights for Negroes, as they were commonly known back then, was what truly benefited the nation. This one looks the same to me as that one.
Sure, the Democrats could do more, but at least Obama often mentions Gays and Lesbians in his speeches in his litany of inclusion of all Americans.
When was the last time you heard a Republican candidate mention Gays or Lesbians, unless they were talking about their lesbian daughter and saying it was none of our fuckin’ business? Or unless they were tap dancing in a men’s room and got caught? Or unless they were caught emailing love notes to young male Congressional pages?
As I mentioned to a woman friend who thinks women voting Republican simply because Palin is a woman are idiotic, if McCain had had a brain seizure and selected an openly Gay man as his VP for his gimmick instead of a woman, I still wouldn’t be stupid enough to vote for the Republicans.
But Sampiro, I will raise you one…I knew a guy who was not only a member of the Log Cabin Republicans, he was also a member of Dignity! For those of you who don’t know, Dignity is a Gay group of Catholics who are so indoctrinated and filled with Catholic guilt, they continue to meet in clandestine groups outside of the church (that basically wants nothing to do with them). As an ex-Catholic, I find it mind-boggling that you would want to have anything to do with a religion that basically claims you are going to hell because you are not a celibate homosexual - especially considering the Catholic Church has such a stellar record when it comes to morally and sexually upstanding priests.
In 1976, women’s rights were coming to Spain. Running to Spain, is more like it. Women were about to get the right to vote back. Women were joining careers that had traditionally been viewed as “too brainy for the girls.” Women had been regranted the right to own property and to buy and sell it. Women were, again, being able to keep control over some of the money they’d earned, instead of being automatically treated like imbeciles who needed a man’s supervision.
That doesn’t mean that the three professors who voted against my (future) college accepting women weren’t assholes, you know.
imbecile in this case being used in its original Roman Law meaning of “someone incapable of deciding by him/herself.”
I understand exactly what you’re saying, Sampiro, and I did specifically mention “deal-breakers” elsewhere in the post you quoted.
Let me try to explain this way: I have some friends who are gay. It’s just a part of who they are, like their gender, their profession, their hobbies, and so forth. Their friends know they’re gay, but you could easily spend an evening with them without noticing. They’re more likely to talk about their pets than their sexual orientation. I don’t see it as any kind of betrayal for them to vote for Republican candidates–especially gay-friendly Republican candidates.
Another is GAY. It defines her life: how she dresses, how she talks, how she acts. If you somehow don’t notice within 15 seconds of meeting her, she’ll point it out. She attends rallies and signs petitions. If she voted for a Republican it would be a betrayal of everything she stands for.
HOWEVER, if you think there aren’t homophobic Democrats in office, you’re fooling yourself. I always look at the candidate, not just the (D) or (R) after their name.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are championing your cause, right? They’re fighting back all these bills through filibusters and the media? If they are, I don’t really see it. That could be a failure on my part, though.
Maybe it’s because I’m somewhat of an outside observer (being straight and all), but it seems to me that your choice is really between a great big pile of crap and a somewhat smaller but still quite substantial pile of crap. Sure, one pile is smaller than the other, but it’s still a pile of crap.
I’m like this. I have only one close gay friend, I’m far more likely to discuss movies or books or current events or my dogs or the current house renovation I’m doing [alright, that one’s kind of iffy] or tell funny stories than I am to discuss gay rights. I’m not closeted but there are many people who don’t know I’m gay because we’ve never talked about it and I’m not particularly obvious (not that there’s anything wrong with that [which I actually mean]).
BUT
This doesn’t mean I don’t have very strong opinions on the matter. And please know I’m sincere when I say I know you’re not being intentionally offensive and I’m not trying to be either, but it’s an insult to compare sexual orientation to “profession and hobbies and so forth”- all of which are subject to change. It’s far mroe akin to gender [as you mentioned] or race or age or health status or some other unalterable demographic and not something you can pick up and put down.
Quite irrelevant aside: I have a friend who’s a (quite identifiable) lesbian who led the first ever gay pride march in Montana, where she was a deputy sheriff at the time. Hysterically funny story, incidentally.
When the choice is between a party who’s not infringing on your rights and one who’s actively hoping to infringe upon them, you take the lesser of the two weevils. That said, yes, there are most certainly some Dem politicians who have championed the cause.
I apologize. I didn’t mean it that way. Age, race, gender, and so forth are much more analogous.
I hope you understand that what I was trying to say is that on a day-to-day basis, many people find their profession (for example) to be a more important part of their identity than their sexual orientation. This is why many people find themselves in heavy counseling after losing their jobs or retiring, because for most of their adult lives, their professions have defined who they are.
I tend not to suffer from that syndrome, having made several radical career changes, but I’ve been a writer–either full or part-time–for many years, and that makes issues like freedom of speech huge for me. Honestly, Sampiro, I’ve probably spoken out more about gay rights than some of my gay friends have, and I’m as straight as they get. We all have our priorities.
“Log Cabin Republicans” . . . boy, they ain’t goin’ for subtle, are they?
“So, how many logs have you had in your cabin, Senator?”
Hey! Don’t bring corset wearers into it. I am very much in favor of corset wearer. Male or female. As well as high heels and makeup.
That said and more to the point to the whole “protection of marriage” thing just makes me ill. My aunt just got married. Well they were married for a good 20 years. But now they’re legally hitched. And if anything made this hetosexul chick appciate marriage it was my gay aunt.
What else? I don’t get LCR or people on this board calling LGBT issues just so much one party issues. It’s a basic idea about human rights.
If you dont’ know that you don’t know shite from shinola.
Not to mention how much of a minority voting bloc gay people are.
It’s pretty simple: those who believe that gay people are people and have every right to be treated as such, over here.
Those who believe that gays are sick, perverted trash, over there.
In the long run, this one’s going to be decided by the fact that teens and twentysomethings are overwhelmingly in the first group, and those younger than them will likely be there too. Those who hate teh gay will eventually die off, and the GOP will have been on the wrong side of history yet again, as they were on civil rights and women’s rights.
The GOP’s opposition to equal rights for African-Americans remains with them, as they continue to try to fight a nonexistent ‘voter fraud’ epidemic by measures that disproportionately exclude blacks from the voter rolls: it’s not just a historical artifact that they’ve left behind.
The GOP’s opposition to equal rights for women manifested itself earlier this year, when the GOP blocked the Lilly Ledbetter Act that would have undone last year’s Supreme Court decision in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. suit.
This is today’s GOP, like it or not. No matter how clean one’s individual reasons are for supporting the GOP are, doing so means throwing in with those who would deny equal rights to women and minorities, including gays. The GOP opposition to equal rights for gays isn’t some outlier; it’s part and parcel of what the Republican Party has been about for the past 40 years.
I just have to chime in a state what an amazing line this is.
Oh, and I’ve never understood the LCR. Seems to me like PETA for Fur Coats. Suntin jus aint righ’ ‘bou’ dat.
He didn’t manage to work in the meatball-thingy sense, or cigarettes (fags). But otherwise, yeah.