Will Gays Start Flocking To The GOP Now That Obama Has Been Such A Huge Disappointment?

For now, conservative out of the closet gays like Steve Pougnet are only welcome in one party

I read a story about Palm Springs Mayor/Democratic candidate for Congress Steve Pougnet in the Advocate today. I gathered from chatting with him on the phone a couple months ago that he's a pretty conservative Democrat, not the kind that Blue America is likely to ever endorse. His Advocate story is called Married With Children. The Riverside County Democrat and his husband have a pair of young twins. Pougnet may be conservative for a Democrat, just the way Harold Ford is. But neither Ford nor Pougnet would feel all that comfortable in the Republican Party regardless of their policy ideas. Ford is African American and Pougnet is gay-- gay and out and married and proud of who he is. (I don't think Pougnet is quite as conservative as your garden variety 2010 Republican either-- and maybe not even as conservative as Ford.) Pougnet is running against Mary Bono Mack-- who is also having to fend off a pack of drooling fringy teabaggers howling for her blood for being, in their eyes, too liberal. She and Pougnet aren't all that far apart on economic issues.

[T]o portray the race as one between a gay rights activist and a right-wing obstructionist is arguably misleading. While not a leader on gay issues, Bono Mack, who was initially elected to fill the congressional seat of her late first husband, Sonny Bono, hasn’t been a true roadblock either. She broke party lines last fall to vote for hate-crimes legislation attached to a military spending bill and recently voiced support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (Bono Mack voted for ENDA in 2007). A spokesman confirmed that she also supports gender identity protections in the current ENDA legislation (the 2007 House bill passed with no transgender-inclusive language). Bono Mack’s stepson Chaz Bono revealed last year that he was a transgender man and had begun taking steps in transitioning. Bono Mack declined requests for an interview.

“Mary is highly respected in Washington and has always been a strong supporter of gay rights,” says Chuck Vasquez, president of the Riverside County-Palm Springs chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, which has endorsed Bono Mack. “She’s not a candidate of political party lines, but of her own convictions. And with the economic state of the district, and with city and local governments in California trying to get everything they can from the federal government, which has raided our budgets, I don’t see how changing to an unknown [candidate] will lead to getting a better job done.”

Pougnet, who has the support of California senator Barbara Boxer and gay representatives Barney Frank and Jared Polis, further points out that his opponent did not take a public stance on Prop. 8, nor has she been a strong advocate for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” one of Pougnet’s chief concerns among gay issues. Bono Mack has said she believes any changes must be made only with extensive consultation with the Pentagon—a strategy that many DADT opponents insist would fail to end the policy.

“To me, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is something that should change as quickly as possible. If I were in Congress, I would have been cosponsoring the [repeal] bill with Rep. Patrick Murphy,” says Pougnet, referring to the lead sponsor of a House bill that would eradicate the 16-year-old ban. “Times are changing, and we’ll beat her.”

Yesterday CBS News did a canned feature called Have Gays Found Their Place In The GOP?, based on what they called "the dramatic moment" at CPAC last weekend in which a shrill, embarrassingly demented homophobe was vociferously boo-ed. It's certainly good that there were more boos than cheers, but then again, college student fave-rave Ron Paul beat slaughtered Palin, Newt and Pawlenty in the straw poll too. Does it mean there's really a place for gays in the GOP?

Interesting question. For one thing, there always has been. If you're rich and you stay in the closet, you could have a brightish future in the GOP. Self-loathing predator and vicious McCarthyite Roy Cohn was a gay Republican icon in his day. Terry Dolan, founder of CPAC back in Reagan's day was a raging homophobe who rarely missed a night in the sleaziest of gay s&m bars. The Bush Regime was loaded with closet cases from Karl Rove and Josh Bolton to Ken Mehlman and Scott McClellan. Anti-gay Republicans in Congress who have been outed in the last few years include Mark Foley (FL), David Dreier (CA), Larry Craig (ID), and Ed Schrock (VA). But there are a dozen currently serving in Congress-- like Dreier-- all as deeply in the closet as they can get, from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham to a whole array of House members like Patrick McHenry (NC), Aaron Schock (IL), Trent Franks (AZ), Mark Kirk (IL) and Adrian Smith (NE), all of whom, except Kirk, are raging homophobes. How could a handful of kids booing a psychopath be "a turning point" when all Republican gay electeds are cowering in their closets?

Gay Republicans say it was a telling moment: Evidence that the GOP is "moving away from a negative hate-based connotation with homosexuals in the Republican party," according to Charles T. Moran, spokesman for the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican group.

"The conservative movement is so focused on the issues that bring us together-- limited government, personal responsibility and freedom-- that the social issues have kind of gotten pushed off to the side," he said. "Even the Tea Party movement-- these people are not talking about social issues."

That isn't to say there hasn't been controversy: Liberty University Law School pulled its sponsorship of the event over GOProud's inclusion as a sponsor, and the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer said following the conference that true conservatives should abandon CPAC for the AFA's Values Voter Summit, where organizers believe "that protecting one man-- one woman marriage is the most fundamental conservative value of all."

Maybe so... but gay Republicans say they have Dick Cheney on their side.