Republican Party's "Gay Problem" Rearing Its Head Again

GOP closet case Aaron Schock (right) says he burned the outfit.

There are Republicans-- usually the greed-and-selfishness wing of the party rather than the hatred-and-bigotry wing-- who aren't really very anti-gay at all. The American Conservative Union, which was once chaired by traumatically outed (underage male hookers) GOP closet case Rep. Bob Bauman (R-MD), has long been in charge of organizing the far right's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) get-together.

Just before Christmas ACU disclosed that a non-closeted gay right-wing group, GOProud, would be considered a "participating organization," the second-highest level of participation for this year's CPAC, giving them a voice in planning the conference. Perhaps some of the hatred-and-bigotry groups envision mauve and shocking pink place settings and CPAC-branded condoms in the gift bags. In any event, general freakout on the far edges of the right has ensued. And yesterday a rightist propaganda rag reported that some of the hate groups so important to the Republican coalition are bailing on CPAC because of GOProud's participation.

Two hate groups, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, have joined a boycott of CPAC by the anti-gay fanatics who run the American Principles Project, as have fringe groups like American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage.

The mini-civil war over the gays comes on top of a predictable outcome of all the glorification of greed and selfishness inside the GOP-- an embezzlement scandal in which the ex-wife of ACU Chairman David Keene is suspected of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization.

"Excellent. It is gratifying to see FRC and CWA respond appropriately to CPAC's moral sellout of allowing GOProud as a sponsor," said Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, the nation's best-known organization dedicated exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda.

"By bringing in GOProud, CPAC was effectively saying moral opposition to homosexuality is no longer welcome in the conservative movement," said LaBarbera. "Would CPAC bring in an organization specifically devoted to promoting abortion and pretend it's conservative?" LaBarbera has formerly participated in CPAC, but said he may protest the conference this year.

"Shame on CPAC for defending the absurd proposition that one can be 'conservative' while embracing moral surrender-- in this case the idea espoused by GOProud of the government granting 'rights' and benefits based on sinful sexual conduct long regarded as anathema to biblical and Judeo-Christian values," LaBarbera added.

"[ACU has] gone libertarian, that's their focus," said Mat Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, a public interest law firm. "Libertarianism is right on the economy, often wrong on national defense, and doesn't care about social conservatism. Libertarians only respect one leg of the Reagan revolution, and you can't stand for long on one leg."

"[GOProud is] why Liberty Counsel and Liberty University dropped out of CPAC," Staver told WND. "Last year Liberty University was a CPAC sponsor, and we worked on a committee selecting speakers. We were not informed that GOProud was a consponsor. They were brought in at the eleventh hour, and we learned about it in a homosexual blog."

Liberty Counsel responded by sending a protest letter to the ACU.

"We said GOProud is not a conservative organization," said Staver. "They are undermining the military" by promoting open homosexuality, and "undermining marriage" by opposing the Defense of Marriage Act, which preserves the traditional definition of marriage by limiting it to one man and one woman.

"Anything that undermines marriage also undermines our freedom and economy," said Staver. "It is contrary to our fundamental values to have as a cosponsor an organization that promotes same-sex marriage."

"GOProud doesn't fit in any of the areas of conservatism within CPAC," Staver continued. "We asked CPAC to disassociate themselves from GOProud, but they refused to.

All this high-profile bickering about gays comes right before the likely outing of right-wing South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Washington, DC's most notorious closet queens. More and more Republican closet cases-- from Graham, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and newly elected Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) to incoming House Rules Committee Chair David Dreier (R-CA), rising Republican star Aaron Schock (R-IL) and a whole slew of hypocritical Republican backbenchers like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Adrian Smith (R-NE)-- are moving into important power positions inside a party half of whose base is obsessed with homophobia.

Meanwhile gay Republicans-- usually fiscal conservatives into the selfishness at the base of the right-wing agenda-- are beginning to assert themselves, claiming, delusionally, that anti-gay hysteria has nothing to do with conservatism. In the just-released list of 10 important people who voluntarily came out of the closet this past year, we find, besides pop culture celebrities like Ricky Martin, Sean Hayes, Chely Wright and Amber Heard, the former chairman of the Republican Party and the manager of George W. Bush's re-election campaign, Ken Mehlman, and Christian conservative icon Pastor Jim Swilley.

This list, of course, doesn't count all the Republicans who tumbled out of their closets involuntarily, often tragically, caught in the kinds of horrific situations closetry drives people to. California state Senator Roy Ashburn's outing should have been a teachable moment for Republican politicians cringing in their closets. He practically begged them to just come out and stop subjecting themselves to the terror and self-loathing identified with the closet. No one took his advice.

In fact, just his week the American far right's obsession with spreading its anti-gay hysteria to Uganda and across Africa bubbled over again as so-called "Christian" activist Martin Ssempa fled Uganda after a plot was uncovered to frame another pastor as gay.

According to the Advocate, Ssempa working with other anti-gay activists paid a man to say that Kayanjay had sexually assaulted him. After no evidence was found, Robson Matoyu, the man who’d accused Kayanjay, admitted that he’d been paid to lie on the innocent clergyman by Ssempa and other conspirators.

...Ssempra has made headlines over the last two years for his vocal stance against homosexuality and his support of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would make physical acts with members of the same sex punishable by the death penalty. He has organized demonstrations and spoken out in public for the bill -- often associating the LGBT community with pedophilia, insisting that he is a protector of children, and claiming that Uganda as a country opposes LGBT rights.

And, as I keep saying, and right-wing dimwit Jonah Goldberg confirmed in yesterday's L.A. Times, the whole gay thing has shifted from a state of rebelliousness and an outlaw lifestyle that attracted one archetype to... well, something increasingly insipid and white-bread, bourgeois enough even for Republicans. In fact, Goldberg's premise is that the very concept of a homosexual bourgeoisie is "subversive to both liberals and conservatives."

Two decades ago, the gay left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian "free love." And avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents' generation along with their gray flannel suits.

...[L]ook at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by the Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used "don't ask, don't tell" as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.

Many of my conservative friends often act as if there's some grand alternative to both the bohemian or the bourgeois lifestyles. But there isn't. And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos-- the homosexual bourgeoisie-- strikes me as good news.