The Sickness Of Coming Out As A Trumpist-- A Gay One No Less

Not the real Adam Levine, obviously

Mel Levine was an over-achiever. A graduate of Beverly Hills High, he was elected student body president of UC Berkely in 1963 before heading off first to Princeton and then to Harvard. He was elected to the state Assembly in 1983 and ten years later became a congressman. He voted for the Iraq war in 1991 and was defeated in the Democratic Senate primary by Barbara Boxer the following year. Currently (age 74) he's the president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners. He has 3 grown children. One is Adam Levine, a yappy gay Republican, considerably less of an achiever than his dad, who wrote a self-pitying essay for The Federalist last week about how much harder it was to come put as a Trump-supporting Republican than it had been to come out as gay. Many of his friends have abandoned him, not because he's gay but because he joined the Republican Party.

Full of hate and confusion he wrote that he grew up in a liberal Jewish family and "was indoctrinated with all of the correct values and views. He sounds like a very sick, very unhappy self-loathing twit. He also sounds like an incredibly spoiled, dense moron; Trump is perfect for him:

When I was seven, my dad took me on a celebrity-packed camping trip to Death Valley as part of a campaign to protect California’s deserts. Israel took center stage in family discussions. I attended a Quaker elementary school, where I learned the black national anthem before I knew the “Star Spangled Banner.” In high school art class, I even chose to focus on man’s destruction of the environment. I came out to my family as gay at the ripe age of 20, and they were duly overjoyed.

It was always a given that Republicans are bad people, representative of that shameful sliver of our flawed society that values money above the planet and think the world would be better off if everyone were a straight, white male. At a minimum they are racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Left to their own devices, they would exclude ethnic minorities from everything, kick sinful gay offspring onto the streets, and pave our parks over with oil derricks.

...When, in my adulthood, the liberal policy agenda became problematic for me, I found myself at a loss. I began to raise questions with my family and friends, and met resistance. It was not because my concerns were particularly inappropriate; I was just not supposed to be questioning at all.

One could disagree with nuances, but not the judgment of the (then) president, or the party. Period. The irony of this apparent intolerance for diversity of thought by the party claiming to champion the rights of groups underserved by the status quo was not lost on me.

For the first time in my progressive life, standing up for the values that I most strongly espouse-- truth, morality, self-reliance, boundaries, tolerance, and a healthy dose of Jewish skepticism-- was damaging my reputation and character. When I publicly opposed my dad’s support of the Iran deal, I was admonished. I had few friends with whom I could have a civil political conversation: one stopped all communication with me for two weeks because Trump won the presidency.

If Republicans are bad, Trump is nothing less than Satan embodied. Post-election family gatherings devolved into group Trump-bashing, which intensified as more rumors of my dubious views wafted across town. I did not even bother going to gay pride because it was fused with a Resist march. If you do not want to impeach our president, you have no place in gay life.

I was labeled a white supremacist by a friend I’ve known my entire life, and completely dropped with no explanation by another dear friend and self-anointed giant of the gay civil rights movement to whom my father had introduced me 15 years ago.

Yes, I was in despair, but I was also outraged at not being understood for views that felt so plainly obvious to me logically and experientially. These were not pie-in-the-sky views I was advocating in order to provoke. The Affordable Care Act has made medical treatment of my bipolar disorder more expensive than ever. Under the nuclear agreement, Iran flagrantly continues to enrich uranium and fund terrorist activities.

As a small business owner, I am regularly assaulted with financially crushing, nonsensical red tape and bureaucracy, much implemented as lip service to environmental protection. With few exceptions, every one of my good friends feels more economically hopeless after the “recovery” than before, and abject homelessness on the streets of my beloved city has swelled to egregious levels.

In desperation, like a closeted teenager sneaking into a porn theater, I surreptitiously began to explore the forbidden territories of Fox News and other conservative outlets. Incredibly, I found myself agreeing more often than not.

Fine, I thought, but that is where I had to draw the line. A couple of conservative encounters does not a conservative make, right? Until more liberals began to recognize the disingenuousness and destructiveness of my party’s stances, I just resolved to stick it out. I did everything in my power to avoid that one last unspeakable, fatal option: turning Republican.

Harvey Weinstein Was the Last Straw

Then Harvey Weinstein provided me the impetus I lacked: the media outlets that had enabled and covered up his indiscretions for years were the same major public voices for the Democratic Party, the self-proclaimed party of worker’s and women’s rights. The game was up; two and two could no longer be five. I reached my threshold where no amount of hypothetical Republican bigotry or greed could approach the magnitude of hypocrisy, corruption, or criminality I saw rotting the Democrats to the core. I jumped ship.

Harvey Weinstein? That's what turned someone off to the Democratic Party? Harvey Weinstein and assholes like him have nothing to do with the Democratic Party. Zero-- except in the minds of Republican idiots. Complain about Pelosi or Lipinski or Sinema or Hoyer... but Harvey Weinstein? No one ever heard of him except in the tiny Hollywood crowd and in circles around the Levine family, until he got caught. Jews and gays-- let alone Jewish gays-- should have an historical knowledge of what it means to fool around with fascists. If Mel Levine was an over-achiever it sure wasn't as a father. Voting for the Iraq War and not teaching his sad-sack son the dangers of fascism are serious flaws. 1992 California Democrats had something figured out:

• Barbara Boxer- 1,339,126
• Leo McCarthy- 943,229
• Mel Levine- 667,359