As The GOP Doubles Down On Homophobia, Do Gay Republicans Have A Role To Play Any Longer?

Right wing hedge fund operator and vulture capitalist Paul Singer may be best known as one of the money bags behind Mitt Romney but the ardent defender of the prerogatives of the one percent and their right to rule without interference from government (he's been on an anti-Dodd Frank jihad, for example) is also one of the biggest supporters of bombing Iran and of gay equality inside the reaches of the Republican Party and its right-wing satellite groups. Odd combination? His son is gay and married his husband in 2009 and Singer is a Zionist... and a billionaire. Its all about him-- always.

Just under two years ago, late simmer, 2012, Singer gave his last check to GOProud, the extreme right-wing-- and very divisive-- gay organization he had been funding. As the Republican Party digs in its heels on gay reparative therapy, GOProud, which unofficially died when Singer pulled the financial plug, has now made it official. A group backing equal right for the LGBT community can't thrive among the bigots and hate-mongers that utterly dominate the right-wing of the Republican Party.

Although sane states have followed the lead of progressives like California state Senator Ted Lieu in banning the quackery of conversion therapy, no one has been able to get a straight answer if gay Republican political elites themselves have undergone conversion therapy. Since the Texas GOP is lining up behind it, maybe someone should ask closet case Rick Perry for an answer. Other tragic Republicans who may or may not have undergone conversion therapy who should comment on its effective include the two U.S. senators from South Carolina, lifelong gay bachelors Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, not to mention Wyoming's John Barrasso, Mark Kirk, Miss McConnell and a dozen House members from gay wingnuts Aaron Schock (R-IL), Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC) to Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Adrian Smith (R-NE).

Under the new proposed plank, the Texas GOP would "recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle."

The American Psychological Association and other major health organizations have condemned such counseling, which generally try to change a person's sexual orientation or to lessen their interest in engaging in same-sex sexual activity. The groups say the practice should not be used on minors because of the danger of serious psychological harm.

But trying to strip the language from the Texas GOP platform could set off a contentious fight and result in altering the language even more. The therapy phrasing survived a key committee vote late Thursday, but hardliners had sought to change "homosexuality" in the platform to "sexual sins."

Also on the table is removing decades-old language that states, "homosexuality tears at the fabric of society." Davis said that was the only language his group sought to change at the convention, and that he still wanted to go home with that win.

The therapy language was inserted at the urging of Cathie Adams of Dallas, leader of the influential tea party group Texas Eagle Forum and a onetime chairwoman of the Texas Republican Party.

Adams, whose group backed tea party outsiders who dominated Texas Republican primary races this year, said she simply promoted language proposed by a man she said was helped by such therapy, which has been defended by some smaller groups, including the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.

"He knows what he's talking about. He is one of those who has benefited," Adams said. "I think the majority of Texans feel that way too. It's not like this is mandatory. This is only a voluntary program."

Yesterday, Tim Mak, writing for the Daily Beast, covered the sad, messy GOProud implosion. "The decline of GOProud," he writes, "is a prime example of what happens to an organization that rises to prominence through confrontation-- and never bothers to do the grunt work needed to sustain the outfit, once the outrage dies down. It was feisty and controversial-- a Tea Party, of sorts, to the more establishment-minded Log Cabin Republicans." They may have decided to make it "official" this week, but what was left of the organization has been moribund since Singer, who had given them close to $600,000-- informed them they'd better find a new sugar daddy. Thegroup's founders, Christopher Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia, quit.

In the summer of 2013, LaSalvia and Barron sold GOProud’s brand name, one of the organization’s computers, a contact list, and some posters to three former interns, and stepped away from the day-to-day management of the group.

Matt Bechstein, now the executive director of what is left of GOProud, said they purchased it for less than three figures. Barron said it was a nominal amount, $1. “It certainly wasn’t fair market value,” Barron said.

In a way, GOProud had already died last summer. The former interns only filed the necessary paperwork to organize “GOProud 2.0” in January 2014. Bechstein had purchased a brand that was in bad shape.

“There was donor discontent, the organization was broke, they were having difficulty raising money, and they ruined just about every relationship possible,” Bechstein said, referring to the former management.

The future of GOProud, once a leading voice for gay conservatives, looks bleak. The organization still exists in theory, but it now faces the possibility of shutting down, changing its name, or changing its organizational type. “There’s high amounts of chaos and confusion,” he said, since any remaining donors have been spooked by reports that the group is closing down.

There’s no love lost between the former leadership and the current leadership.

“Most people assume GOProud died a year ago. GOProud was constantly part of the conversation, shaking things up. Over the last year… I never heard from GOProud. Quite frankly, I don’t know what they’ve done over the past year. I’ve seen nothing,” Barron said.

Countered Bechstein, “They’ve been antagonistic to me since Day One… we came to be the antithesis of Jimmy and Chris, who ruined the organization.”

GOProud first elbowed its way into the conservative movement in the spring of 2009, but struggled in its early days as a startup. Really, it was nothing more than Barron and LaSalvia and a Twitter account, crammed into a Capitol Hill basement office for which they paid $800 a month. The group’s first acts were small. Fundraising during its launch netted only about $3,000, LaSalvia said.

But GOProud’s prominence really emerged in 2010, after conservative activist Ryan Sorba denounced them from the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“I’d like to condemn CPAC for bringing GOProud to this event,” Sorba told the audience at the annual conservative gathering, to a smattering of boos. “The lesbians at Smith College protest better than you. Bring it.”

LaSalvia, sitting outside the room, looked down at his phone. Just moments after Sorba’s rant, a $500 donation came into GOProud’s account. Many major news outlets at CPAC, eager to write about something other than the typical rotation of politicians coming up to speak on stage, covered Sorba’s outburst.

“That’s really when we got famous,” LaSalvia said. Momentum flowed from controversy. They spent their last few hundred dollars on a trip up to New York City, obtaining donor commitments that kept them alive.

That summer, they held a prominent event with Ann Coulter and some 150 supporters at the New York City apartment of billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel, which attendees nicknamed “Homocon.” Months later, GOProud targeted four congressional districts with an ad parodying the television show Real Housewives, targeting gay men and women on Bravo and Lifetime, even running the ad during the Project Runway finale.

The 2012 presidential cycle smothered GOProud, LaSalvia argued, saying that the organization’s endorsement of Mitt Romney was a low point. The support of a candidate who opposed same-sex marriage-- and the noise of the presidential campaign-- combined to make them feel sidelined.

“We were following, we were falling in line… no one was out front that year,” he said.

The highlight of that year, LaSalvia said, was when more than 900 people showed up to GOProud’s 2012 Republican convention party in Tampa Bay, at a gay bar.

Rebranding-- Republicans And The LGBT Community

Will Lindsey be at CPAC to talk about Benghazi & cruise for college studs?

So far the GOP rebranding effort has fallen flat on its face. Their war on women seems as endless as it is pointless and, although 87 Republicans, most of whom hail from competitive non-Confederate districts, voted with Democrats for the Violence Against Women Act, most congressional Republicans-- including virtually all of the party leaders-- still support violence against women. Their war against immigrants in general and Latinos in particular is one hot mess with conflicting messages clogging up the airwaves, some of which are shockingly racist. As for Bobby Jindal's plea to his fellow Republicans to stop being the "stupid party," no one even ever gave that a second thought. If they stopped being the stupid party, they lose almost their entire base. And then there's the far right jihad against the LGBT community. Sure, a handful of high-profile, mostly non-electoral Republicans from non-Southern states, like Clint Eastwood, are pro-LGBT equality, but the Republican Party remains the biggest impediment to equality in the country.

Last week, when Long Island Republican Congressman Peter King said "If Republicans had any brains they'd stay away from CPAC," he didn't have CPAC's anti-gay agenda in mind. But that agenda is certainly part of the GOP civil war that's tearing the party apart. This week's big conservative conclave in DC has already been tainted because of the exclusion of GOProud, a very right wing-- way more so than the more mainstream GOP Log Cabin Republicans, for example-- part of the crackpot far right fringe. But, apparently not fringe enough-- at least not when it comes to one issue.

The decision to exclude GOProud for the second year in a row has triggered a schism between conservatives who plan to boycott the conference until GOProud is invited and those who believe the group goes against social conservative values.

S.E. Cupp, a conservative commentator on MSNBC, is refusing to attend CPAC without GOProud. Other well-known conservatives have backed up her decision and condemned CPAC’s intolerance. The National Review published an editorial today noting that the exclusion of GOProud has had “a greater downside for CPAC than its past of GOProud ever did”:

Conservative opinion on the intersection of homosexuality and politics is not monolithic, especially among the college-aged set that makes up the better part of CPAC attendees. And a gathering that hopes to speak for the conservative movement will be better equipped to do so if it represents the overlapping gamut of views included in it.

CPAC Chairman Al Cardenas denies that GOProud was uninvited because gay people are unwelcome at CPAC, but rather because they “did not act properly as guests” last time. Cardenas said the group held press conferences attacking CPAC board members, which led to board members voting against them. Though Cardenas now insists that gay conservatives are welcome, his own wife said in 2011 that GOProud was banned because homosexuality “is a threat to society” and “not nature’s way.”

This year, according to notoriously right-wing columnist Jennifer Rubin, a CPAC sponsor employee blamed CPAC’s reluctance to “cross groups that are big sponsors that have said they’d leave if GOProud is ‘in the building.’” Indeed, several major sponsors including the Family Research Council refused to attend CPAC in 2011 when GOProud was participating.

This latest clash over conservative exclusion reflects the Republican Party’s new anxiety over outreach to minorities, women, young people and gay voters, all demographics that voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in the 2012 election. Still, even GOProud’s defenders have avoided opening debate on real policy shifts. Rubin argued, “No one is asking CPAC to endorse gay marriage or any other policy… merely to let gays into the room.” The National Review also reassured CPAC that including GOProud would “not now…imply its endorsement of any particular policies regarding gays.”

Many Republicans outside the religionist lunatic corners of the party don't care one way or the other about people being gay or straight-- as long as they keep it quiet and forget that whole "proud" thing and as long as no one in Malaya is paying them under the table to take part in a McCarthyite smear campaign. To those kinds of Republicans, the only good gay is a gay in the closet-- even if its the closeted gay with the severe emotional and psychological problems. Just look how willing Republicans are to accept horribly flawed gay officials in their midst as long as they keep their closet doors tightly shut-- like Miss McConnell (R-KY), Dave Camp (R-MI), Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC)-- or even just mostly shut tight like Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Aaron Schock (R-IL). As Peter King said, "If Republicans had any brains they'd stay away from CPAC." But then... what would the rest of us do for entertainment this coming week? Well... we could read Mac Blumenthal's delightful book, Republican Gomorrah, where you can find all sorts of useful information on the subject, like this:

In 1996, Henry Adams, Lester Wright and Bethany Lohr, psychiatrists and researchers at the University of Georgia, investigated the link between homophobia and repressed homosexuality, surveying over fifty self-declared heterosexual males on their opinions of gays. The subjects were then separated into two groups: homophobic and nonhomophobic. Both groups were shown gay male pornography and were monitored for signs of sexual arousal. (The results appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.) The study revealed that by an overwhelming margin, the subjects who registered the largest increase in penis circumference-- those most aroused by gay pornography-- also held the most homophobic opinions. The remarkable finds of this experiment suggest a clue to why the modern radical right, the most homophobic political movement in American history, has become a sanctuary for repressed gay men.

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.

Conservative Gay Lawmakers Reject A Degrading Life In The Closet

I got to watch the Parliamentary debate over the first Iraq War when a friend of mine, a member of the House of Commons, invited me to sit in for the day and then have lunch in the members dining room. It was an enjoyable and stimulating experience, primarily dominated by Margaret Thatcher. My friend, though, was a gay Conservative. Honestly, I can't remember if he was in the closet or out of the closet-- at least politically. Everyone who knew him certainly knew he was as gay as wrapping paper. Of course the same could have been said of Mark Foley (R-FL), David Dreier (R-CA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) before they were outed. "Everyone" knows they're gay-- except the dullards in the Republican base who haven't a clue.

Today GOProud, the Republican Party's far right-wing version of the mainstream conservative gay Republicans (the Log Cabin Republicans), pointed proudly that the number of openly gay Conservatives in the House of Commons could treble. Nice that they're celebrating, but I wonder if they've ever thought about asking our own conservatives why it's such a taboo to embrace their sexuality on this side of the pond.

Lindsey Graham and David Dreier still think they're fooling someone about being straight. I don't see GOProud mentioning that South Carolina is on the verge of being the first state in the country with a gay Republican Governor and a gay Republican Lt. Governor, albeit two closeted ones. Of course not every gay conservative politician is from South Carolina-- even if they do have the most per square mile. Is GOProud proud of Adam Schock (R-IL)? Patrick McHenry (R-NC)? Adrian Smith (R-NE)? Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)? Mitch McConnell (R-KY)? Or are they spending all their time cheering the Brits-- and violent and vicious Utah homophobe and anti-gay crusader rabbit, Jason Chaffetz?

GOProud members, if there are any, could do worse than reading Sarah Hepola's Gay Men Go To Hell, an interview with God Says No author James Hannaham about "religious repression, life in the closet and sex in the bathroom," at today's Salon. And while they're over at Salon, an even more direct must-read, Behind Washington's Closet Door which traces political closet queenery from American Conservative Union chairman Bob Baumann (R-MD)-- who was arrested for soliciting sex from a 16 year old boy while serving in Congress-- to more recently outed gay Republicans like Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), Larry Craig (R-ID), Jim McCrery (R-LA) and Charlie Crist (R-FL) is also available. Let's celebrate all the out conservatives in the British Parliament after David Dreier, Charlie Crist, Lindsey Graham and Patrick McHenry say "So what; there's nothing wrong with it-- and I'm terribly sorry for all the pain I caused gay families with my viciously homophobic votes in the past. I'll make up for it in the future."

Gay Republicans Splitting Into Spatting Factions-- God's Plan?

Right-wing radio host John Batchelor's funeral oration over the rotting corpse of the Republican Party was my favorite read of yesterday. And as he points out, the Democrats, alas, had nothing to do with it; it was malicious suicide. I'd recommend you read the whole thing-- which is why I have that link up top. But here's a taste:

The Republican Party is dead like Lehman Brothers and Robert E. Lee, not to be revived by TARP, Rupert Murdoch, or a surge of feverish nationalism. The present financial collapse makes it plain to see that the Republican Party did not die recently at the hands of the clever Democrats, but rather in 1933 at the hands of cowards, sycophants, and snobs who regarded the awesome Democratic victories in 1930 and 1932 as a “smear” of Herbert Hoover and a “panic.” Since the Great Depression I, the Democrats have been the electorate’s default choice, the politicians who rule as if America was simultaneously a school district, a union hall, a junior-year-abroad seminar, and a PAC. The Republicans who pop up now and again thrive in the empty-quarter counties of the West or in the so-called Old South, which is better understood as Confederacy Lite.

...Vigilant Democrats worry today that the Republican Party is only playing possum, or that it can be revived by extraordinary means such as a Martian invasion. In fact, the GOP is a mummy-wrapped skeleton sitting in its own chilly mausoleum of bilious resentments and creepy sentimentality. What remains to call themselves Republicans are baldly badly educated or just prankish Confederate re-enactors-- chubby men in gray and butternut suits with gold buttons and feather-tipped hats, clanking down stairs with shiny sabers. A handful of them are just boors from the South who look poorly on horseback and wave unread Bibles while calling for Billy Sunday to rise like the gold market.

...The party’s death 76 years ago was never more obvious than over the last six months of the financial crisis. The Democrats sensibly blamed the feckless, bootless Bush administration for the collapse of the markets. Tongue-tied Bush and dyspeptic Cheney defended themselves with grunts and sarcasm before they surrendered to Congress by sending out the plutocrat Hank Paulson with a plan called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). A breathing Republican Party would have brought out the flintlocks, boarded the windows, and settled down for a defense of the republic. Instead, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate rushed to grab the pork bribery and vote with the Democrats. John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and Judd Gregg distinguished themselves as dhimmis and were later rewarded by the victorious Democrats by being granted parakeet cages for offices in the new Congress. The House Republicans now boasts that they voted a goose egg against the stimulus package, but this was just the twitching of the corpse. The truth about the House Republicans-- cowards, sycophants, and snobs just like 1930’s lot-- is illustrated by the fact that 85 of them voted for the ludicrous AIG bonus-confiscation bill written on the back of a parking ticket.

If you've ever heard more than 10 minutes of Batchelor's show, you know he's a right wing fanatic. But he's hardly the only one who's sickened by the Republican Party these days. New polling shows that while President Obama's approval rating has climbed from 67% to 68%, the Republican Party is viewed even more unfavorably than it was last week. Last week only 65% of Americans thought they sucked. This week it was up to 66%. And while 18% still view the Republican congressional caucus favorably, John Boehner's and Miss McConnell's unfavorable ratings have continued to climb-- 58 think Boehner is the worst person in the world and 56% think Miss McConnell is.

Of course if you're a free mouseketeer marketeer and you don't believe in polls, you might prefer to read the tea leaves presented by the market itself. This list comes from Amazon.com and relates to hard-covered autographed copies of the books:

• Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope ($2,000)
• Ronald Reagan, An American Life ($900)
• Bill Clinton, My Life ($300-$500)
• Hillary Clinton, Living History ($300-$500)        
• Joe Biden, Promises To Keep ($300-$500)
• Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith ($300-$500)
• John McCain, Faith of My Fathers ($300-$500)
• Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth ($150-$250)
• George H.W. Bush, All The Best, George Bush ($150-$250)
• Bill Richardson, Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life ($75-$100)
• Colin Powell, My American Journey ($75-$100)

But here's the best part... signed copies of Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor and Newt Gingrich's Lessons Learned The Hard Way, go for just $25, or the same as the list price of the book, so the autograph is essentially free. In fact, there's a huge glut of $23 signed O'Reilly books. The list for the book itself is exactly $23.

 
Another sign o' the times for the right is that a dissident faction of gay conservatives is launching a rival group to the traditional voice of gay Republicans: the Log Cabin Republicans. Yes, there's a gay break-up in the GOP. And while Charlie Crist (R-FL), David Dreier (R-CA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mark Foley (R-FL) will probably stick with the traditionalists at the Log Cabin, don't be surprised if the more extremist closet queens in the GOP-- your Patty McHenrys (NC), Aaron Schocks (IL) and Adrian Smiths (NE) find it more comfy with GOProud the drooling neo-nazis a bit further to the right.

They won't officially come out til Wednesday but gay Republican Washington-- between 20 and 30% of Capitol Hill-- is all atwitter over the new organization which claims to better represent the fringy far right elements of gay Republican world. Apparently Tim Gill, a progressive, has been providing the Log Cabin queens with about one-third of their budget an, like all good Republicans, they sold out immediately. One disgruntled gay wingnut who left the Log Cabin queens for the GOProud queens said gay Republicans need an organization that spends more time talking about tax policy and how the traditional GOP greed and selfishness agenda is a perfect fit for gay Republicans. “There hasn’t been a voice for … gay conservatives for the last five months, really, in Washington. And so as that time has lapsed, that was when we made the assessment and determined the need for an organization in Washington and put the pieces in place to make that happen.” He said GOProud plans to fight Congress' and Obama’s push for higher taxes and work for the repeal of the estate taxes. Perhaps they need to meet Blanche Lincoln. Many gay Republicans, especially DC closet queens, love the name Blanche. People close to Mitch McConnell have been calling him Blanche for years., although the Kentucky closet case prefers them not to do that in public places-- and never when Senator Lincoln is around, which these days is very often. Anyway, the new gay Repugs say their priority will not be gay legislation, just the greed and selfishness stuff. Our own gay art director in West Palm Beach found the perfect little film clip for the unveiling of the new Republican gays. Enjoy:



Meanwhile, McCain's daughter is urging the GOP to get more gay friendly-- for their own good. (And not the Mark Foley-Larry Craig-Patrick McHenry kind of "gay friendly.") I wonder if she's made any headway with dad.

Gay For Trump?

Before we get into the poor delusional souls who are both gay and Trumpist, let me remind you of something notarially related-- basically that Trump's campaign is a pipsqueak operation that is better suited to win a city council seat than the White House. Jonathan Chait reported for New York that it's an absolute strategic and managerial garbage fire. He thinks we may not have to be as concerned that "Trump’s election as president of the United States would pose an unprecedented threat to the health of American democracy and possibly world stability" because he's running "the most organizationally and strategically inept campaign for a successful major-party nominee in recorded history... [and] Trump has absolutely no idea what he’s doing."

“Trump is reliant on information he garners himself, and can be swayed by the last person he talked to,” Parker and Haberman somewhat delicately put it. His campaign staff is far too small, and yet constantly at war with itself, already having gone through multiple shakeups and coups. In keeping with his general disdain for data, Trump has eschewed any use of analytics to target voters or competitive areas. Indeed, he has fixated bizarrely on plans to compete in New York and California, two states where any Republican faces hopeless odds against an entrenched Democratic electorate. He is currently in North Dakota for reasons nobody fully understands. He attacks fellow Republicans for no apparent reason. The super-pac donors who are supposed to be raising money on his behalf are disorganized and confused about basic questions like which super-pac they’re supposed to donate to.

To the extent that running a competent campaign matters, it will hurt Trump very badly. Yes, he won the Republican primary by relying on a massive imbalance of media coverage and exploiting a divided, extremely large field that failed to coalesce against him. Yes, he tapped into deep strains of anger in the conservative base that fellow Republicans ignored. But he’s not a political savant, and he hasn’t abolished the rules of politics. He's a reality-television performer who tapped into a deep vein of cultural resentment that appeals to a decided minority of the electorate. Fortunately, many of the same qualities that would make Trump epically dangerous in the presidency-- his impulsive ignorance, blustering arrogance, and contempt for data-- also make him unlikely to obtain it.

So what's this got to do with a gay person pulling the lever for the candidate of the angry, white, largely male, largely bigoted and hate-filled working class yahoos-- what we call, with sadness, "life's losers"-- who took the Republican nomination away from Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and all the incompetents in between and gave it to Herr Trumpf? Are there angry, white, bigoted males among gays? You tell me; I haven't been in a gay bar in 2 or 3 decades. Luke Brinker writes that "among the Trump Train's passengers is a fiercely committed corps of gay supporters, enamored of the brash billionaire's anti-establishment message and unimpressed by likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton." Some, like Chris Barron, have been kicking around on the fringes of gay politics and are well known for being borderline psychotic, bigoted and twisted. "Donald Trump is the most pro-gay Republican nominee ever," Barron, the former national political director of the Log Cabin Republicans and a co-founder of the now-defunct group GOProud, insisted. He says the LGBT community shouldn't worry about gay issues-- "we've won the day," he declared-- but should "look at the totality of issues that impact them," (jobs, the economy, foreign policy and terrorism). Barron himself is a hater who detests immigrants and has a similar mindset to Trump's.

That may seem difficult to square with Trump's support from evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., his avowed opposition to same-sex marriage and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late archconservative Antonin Scalia. But while early polling shows Clinton a lock to win gay voters, the billionaire's boosters in the community cheer his history of supporting gay rights, his business acumen and his brash, thoroughly unapologetic persona.

After all, Trump went to Elton John's gay wedding and had a gay employee. Barron: "Trump was pro-gay long before it was politically trendy-- unlike Hillary Clinton." Besides, among crazy, usually self-loathing right-wing gays who spend their lives hating (immigrants included) Trump is a dream candidate.

[F]or Trump's gay supporters, his positions on traditional LGBTQ issues are of tertiary interest at best.

Journalist and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (the crackpot on the right), among Trump's most fervent backers in conservative media, pointed to the candidate's hardline immigration policy-- a stance, Yiannopoulos said, that ultimately bolsters gay rights.

"Think of where most immigrants come from: war-torn, socially conservative countries in the Middle East, or violent South and Central American backwaters," Yiannopoulos said in an email. "Neither environment breeds a culture that's particularly interested in or friendly to gay rights. Much as the left likes to bash it, it's western culture that's done the most for queers."

...Many LGBTQ Americans confront a host of economic challenges-- including workplace discrimination and disproportionate rates of homelessness-- but compared to heterosexuals, gays earn higher median incomes, enjoy higher personal savings and are less likely to be unemployed, according to a 2012 study by Prudential.

More affluent voters are more likely to vote Republican, and should Trump lead a deescalation of the right's culture war on LGBTQ issues, many well-to-do gays-- to say nothing of non-gays turned off by the party's social conservatism-- may give the GOP a second look.

Jimmy LaSalvia, who co-founded GOProud with Barron but bolted from the GOP in 2014, citing its persistent "tolerance of bigotry," isn't convinced.

Even if Trump dials back the party's hardline stance on LGBTQ issues, LaSalvia said in a recent interview, gays will recoil from the candidate's rhetoric targeting immigrants, women and Muslims.

"Gay people have been used as political pawns our entire lives. It's personal to us and everyone who's ever been marginalized for political gain," LaSalvia, who endorsed Clinton in December, said.

But Barron is unswayed by such appeals.

"It's what the left is now relying on to try to keep LGBT voters on the Democratic plantation," he said. "Where were all the Muslim groups when it came to the fight for marriage equality? Forgive me if I'm not totally and completely feeling the kinship there."

There is a natural kinship, Yiannopoulos contended, between gays and the onetime Manhattan playboy, to whom he regularly refers to as "Daddy" in tweets cheering Trump's campaign.

"The man built a gold-plated tower with his name on it!" Yiannopoulos said, referring to Trump's home base on Fifth Avenue. "Gay men have a deep, if sometimes brash, sense of the aesthetic, and Trump's is hard to ignore. It's flashy, it's in-your-face, it's fabulous."

"Then there's Trump himself," Yiannopoulos added. "Raw, masculine energy. He's just so much more exciting than normal presidential candidates with their drab expressions and teleprompter speeches."

It's difficult to evade a sense of campiness in the Trump shtick: The remarks about his opponents' (male and female) physical appearances, the flashiness of his campaign rallies (complete with a playlist featuring the Broadway classic "Music of the Night," from Phantom of the Opera) and the carefully-cultivated histrionics ("I do whine because I want to win and I'm not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.")

But Trump may nevertheless confront significant hurdles in winning over LGBTQ voters. A May poll conducted by the firm Whitman Insight Strategies found Trump winning only 16% of the LGBTQ vote to Clinton's 84%. That was worse than the 76% to 22% difference between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, although the survey featured a small sample of only 338 likely voters nationwide.

"He'll definitely do better," Yiannopoulos predicted. "While I doubt many progressive, Democrat-supporting gays will switch over, he'll bring in a huge number who have never voted before in their lives. He's just that compelling."

Wow... things have changed a lot since gays were in the forefront on expanding the boundaries, not just for themselves, but for everyone-- from the time of the French Revolution, the 1848 uprisings across Europe, the Russian Revolution and, more recently, the punk rock revolution. Self-respecting gays I know are all for Bernie. Low-info gays who gravitate towards pop culture defined by Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Judy Garland... that kind of stuff, tend to support Hillary. Are you gay? It doesn't matter, as long as you're #NeverTrump:

I Wonder If There Are Still Any Gays And Lesbians Who Support Trump

This week Roy Moore, who still refuses to concede defeat in the Alabama Senate race, attacked Doug Jones' gay son, Carson for... being gay. (Moore's own son is a serial felon who has been repeatedly arrested for a variety of crimes.) Carson Jones is a zookeeper in Denver who specializes in taking care of elephants. Trump's detestable sons shoot elephants for fun. And Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and vice president, Mike Pence, where named by the advocate this week as two of the three worst homophobes of 2017.

And yet... among all the other blatant and absurd lies Trump told on the campaign trail in 2016 was that he would be a friend to the LGBT community. He's been anything but a friend... except in the case of gay billionaires and gay Wall Street executives. This week Peter Montgomery examined the impact of Trump's first in the Oval Office on the gay community for Right Wing Watch.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump thrilled conservative gay leaders. He promised to “do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens” and described himself as “fine” with marriage equality, which he said had been “settled” by the U.S. Supreme Court. Gay Republicans, who have had little experience with candidates expressing anything other than hostility, lost all sense of perspective. Chris Barron, a co-founder of GOProud, pronounced Trump “a better friend to the LGBT community than Hillary Clinton could ever be.” Breitbartista Milo Yiannapoulos went even further, declaring, “Donald Trump is the most pro-gay candidate in American electoral history.” Both statements were obviously and wildly untrue, as Trump’s damaging first year in office has made clear. As Miranda’s recent post noted, this was the year that the Religious Right moved into the White House. And the consequences for LGBTQ people have been predictably awful.

It is true that Trump once held up a rainbow flag someone handed him at a rally. But more often he was on stage at Religious Right events waving his Bible and pledging to make Christian conservatives more powerful while giving them the Supreme Court of their dreams. There was no way that Trump could keep his promises to the Religious Right-- which delivered an overwhelming majority of white evangelical voters to Trump-- without sacrificing the rights and well-being of LGBTQ Americans.

Indeed, last December, anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively celebrated the election of Trump, who he said wisely concealed his anti-equality agenda as a candidate. Lively predicted that after Trump named new Supreme Court justices, “Kennedy and his homosexualist fellow travelers will presumably never again be able to repeat their past acts of violence to the Constitution and its Biblical foundations.”

Many LGBTQ people have been or will be harmed by broad-based Trump-GOP policies, like the tax bill and its assault on the Affordable Care Act, that also affect millions of non-LGBTQ Americans. But LGBTQ Americans are also facing very focused attacks from the Trump administration. That’s why NBC called Trump’s first 100 days “fear-inducing” for LGBTQ Americans. And by mid-year, German Lopez at Vox was calling Trump’s campaign promises to the LGBTQ community “total bullshit” and Luke Darby at GQ was calling the administration “a disaster for LGBT Americans.” The Human Rights Campaign’s Sarah McBride went even further, writing in Cosmopolitan that the Trump administration has “revealed itself to be the ugliest, most explicitly anti-LGBTQ presidency in U.S. history.” Journalist Michelangelo Signorile seconded that emotion in September.

Here are some of the low points:

Anti-Equality Judges

Trump’s tepid support for marriage equality-- the Supreme Court “settled” the issue and he was “fine” with it-- was always in conflict with his pledge to name Supreme Court justices from a list pre-approved by two right-wing organizations, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society is committed to bringing about right-wing ideological domination in the federal judiciary. And the Heritage Foundation is explicitly committed to waging a multi-faceted campaign to reverse the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. They defiantly insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling-- which they denounce as illegitimate—settled nothing.

It’s worth noting that months before Trump’s “fine” comment, he sang a different tune when speaking with the Christian Broadcasting Network. Speaking to that audience, he called the marriage equality ruling “shocking” and said he had been “very much in favor of letting the states decide” whether to let gay people get married. He assured CBN’s David Brody that conservative evangelicals “can trust me on traditional marriage.”

Trump had pledged to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant for more than a year by Antonin Scalia’s death-- and Republican senators’ unconscionable refusal to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee-- with a judge in the mold of the intensely anti-gay Scalia. The Religious Right was thrilled with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, who showed his stripes with an ideologically strident but legally and logically flawed dissent in a case involving the rights of gay parents. Shannon Minter, a prominent LGBTQ legal advocate, accused Gorsuch of “deliberately trying to muddy the waters” and “trying to provide a road map for hostile state courts” to treat same-sex couples differently from other married couples.

Among Trump’s other awful nominees for lifetime jobs on the federal bench: Matthew Kacsmaryk, deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, who opposes anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people; Damien Schiff, who slammed an anti-bullying program for promoting the “homosexual lifestyle”; and Jeff Mateer, who called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan.” Mateer’s nomination was drawn after it faced intense criticism.

In an exposé of the anti-equality Alliance Defending Freedom, journalist Sarah Posner noted that Trump’s solicitor general, Noel Francisco, is an ADF-allied attorney, and that at least four of Trump’s judicial nominees have ADF ties.

Stripping protections from LGBTQ students, parents and families

One of the first official actions by the Trump administration was the rescinding of an Obama administration letter that had urged public schools to respect the right of transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms appropriate to their gender identity. Then-press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump saw this is a “states’ rights issue.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in May at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing that states should be free to funnel tax dollars to private schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and families.

Ban on Transgender Servicemembers

Trump announced via Twitter that he would ban transgender people from serving in the armed forces “in any capacity,” a policy adopted at the urging of Religious Right leaders like Tony Perkins and over the objections of military leaders. The policy change, while yet to be fully implemented, threatens to upend the lives and careers of thousands of trans people now serving honorably in the military.

Defending Anti-Gay Discrimination

The Department of Justice reversed itself and staked out a legal position in opposition to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, telling a federal appeals court that the ban on sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not apply to discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Reinforcing the Religious Right’s Weaponization of Religious Liberty

Religious Right leaders have made a major strategic push to redefine religious liberty as a weapon against laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. Trump brought anti-gay Religious Right leaders to the White House to celebrate his signing of an executive order on religious liberty; while it did not go as far as conservative evangelicals had hoped, the order left it in Jeff Sessions’ hands to develop the policy. When it comes to protecting civil rights, you really don’t want to be in Jeff Sessions’ hands. Sessions’ guidance on religious liberty included vague but broad language, saying “at least some for-profit corporations” can refuse to hire workers whose beliefs and conduct are “consistent with the employer’s religious beliefs.”

In a behind-closed-doors speech to the anti-gay Religious Right legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, Sessions praised the group’s work to create religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws.

The Trump administration has urged the Supreme Court to back a Colorado baker who ran afoul of the state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern called the administration’s brief in the case “cynical, dishonest, and embarrassing.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed comments made by the solicitor general’s office and said Trump would have no problem with businesses hanging signs saying they don’t serve LGBT customers.

Trump also supports passage of the First Amendment Defense Act, which would enshrine the Religious Right’s desired right to discriminate into federal law.

Empowering an anti-LGBTQ inner circle

In addition to Cabinet nominees like Sessions, DeVos, and Ben Carson, Trump has surrounded himself with anti-LGBT Religious Right activists and leaders and given them powerful positions within the Executive Branch. For example, Roger Severino, a former Heritage Foundation staffer with what a dozen U.S. senators described as “a long history of making bigoted statements toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people,” is now leading Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The intensely anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council has bragged of its victories, which include placing former FRC staffers in “top positions” at the Department of Health and Human Services. FRC’s Ken Blackwell, who says that homosexuality “defies barnyard logic,” led the domestic policy operation for Trump’s transition team.

ProPublica revealed in April that James Renne, who was part of Trump’s transition “landing team” at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before snagging a senior job at the Department of Education, had helped to orchestrate a scandalous purge of LGBTQ employees and information at the Office of Special Counsel during the George W. Bush administration.

Trump has also boosted the public profile of anti-LGBTQ activists like Robert Jeffress, one of Trump’s earliest and most ardent evangelical supporters. Jeffress was chosen to preach at a private service before Trump’s inauguration and has remained a high-profile defender of the administration. Jeffress calls homosexuality “a miserable lifestyle,” said that marriage equality is “the greatest sign of the End Times that we see in our country right now,” and declared that “as a nation, we cannot be blessed by God if we’re rejecting God.”

Appointing anti-LGBT activists to United Nations Delegation

Trump appointed officials from C-Fam and the Heritage Foundation to the U.S. delegation to UN Commission on the Status of Women. C-Fam, also classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is so committed to resisting any recognition of the human rights of LGBTQ people in international agreements that it has teamed up with some of the world’s most repressive regimes to safeguard “traditional” notions of gender, sexuality and family.

Praising Anti-LGBTQ Groups

Trump’s first year in office has been one long thank-you to the conservative white evangelicals who voted overwhelmingly to make him president. Trump and Pence joined other GOP leaders at Ralph Reed’s Road To Majority conference in June; Trump spoke at the opening luncheon, where he said, “I will never, ever let you down.” A few months later, Trump was back before Religious Right activists at the Values Voter Summit, which is convened by the Family Research Council, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Supporting Roy Moore

Roy Moore, twice removed from his position as Alabama’s Chief Justice, was the most extreme anti-LGBTQ candidate in recent memory. Moore’s hostility to gay people extends far beyond marriage equality; he believes homosexuality should be criminalized. Yet Trump not only backed Moore’s candidacy with speeches and robocalls, he also dragged the Republican National Committee into spending money on Moore’s behalf.

Conservatives Want To Give Gays A Choice: Get The Cure Or... Get Killed

Do conservatives-- in this country, at this time, Republicans and Blue Dogs-- want to exterminate gay people? You'll have to ask them. I'm sure the Log Cabin Republicans and the GOProud Republicans don't. I doubt Republican closet cases David Dreier and Charlie Crist and Lindsey Graham want to. (I'm not as certain about more tightly closeted Republicans-- and more hysterical closeted Republicans at that-- like Mitch McConnell, Trent Franks, Adrian Smith and Patrick McHenry. And I'm far less certain about what the religio-fascist C-Street cult would like. They're at least partially behind the Kill the Gays legislation in the process of being adopted by Uganda. Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed huckster Richard Cohen, a self-proclaimed psychologist who says he "cures" gays and wrote a book, Coming Out Straight, that has been widely seen as a profitable joke-- until Ugandan right-wingers started using it to justify their anti-gay jihad. Oh-- and speaking of jihads by religious fanatics... Muslims also offer people who think differently than they do an opportunity to "change or die" just before they're killed (or "converted").

Below are both segments of Rachel's interview with Cohen, who may or may not have worked on Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), another "former" gay who now claims to be (mostly) straight.

McCain's Daughter Warns Of Imminent GOP Civil War-- And Tattoos And Hybrids For Conservatives

It wouldn't be as bloody as Texas Governor Rick Perry's lead balloon of seceding from the Union and sparking another real Civil War, but Meghan McCain warned at the Log Cabin convention yesterday that her party is on the brink of their own civil war. (Interestingly, the gay Republicans have just broken into two warring factions, an extreme right version having formed their own "less gay-oriented," more selfishness-oriented entity called GOProud opposing the Log Cabin Repugs which McCain and GOP consultant Steve Schmidt addressed this weekend.)

This morning we talked about the ferocious and potentially deadly Republican civil war over immigration reform and yesterday we watched as far right extremist Gresham Barrett (R-SC) was mercilessly booed and heckled by further right and even more extremist GOP teabaggers on Friday.

The California Republican Party has erupted into a full blown civil war between mainstream conservatives and ideological extremists from beyond the fringe. They are trying to recall several of their own elected officials and one far right congressman, Devin Nunes, demanded that the state's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, resign. Up in Alaska the Republican Senate president and House speaker joined with a bipartisan majority of state legislators to reject Governor Sarah Palin's choice of bizarre and extremist loon Anthony Ross as Alaska Attorney General. There's barely a state in the Union without a fratricidal bloodletting in GOP-land. It's wrecking the party in Pennsylvania, New York, Kansas, Minnesota, Florida, Colorado and even Utah (despite Rich Frank's claim today that the Mormons have grown all warm and fuzzy and mainstreamish)! Today's GOP stands for nothing but obstructionism... to everything. There's nothing left for them to talk about but secession and cow farts.

Their own base is deserting them in a fit of unfocused rage and ratings-generating ad revenues. As the torment the South Carolina teabaggers put Barrett through showed, the teabaggers are like a genie the GOP and their media allies let out of the bottle. It may be harder to get it back in again.

If Republicans are thinking these are the guys who are going to be manning their phone banks in 2010, the ones who are going to be knocking on doors, or coughing up checks for the RNC-- they better think again. These folks are gone. They've left the reservation-- a lot of them left it back in 1992-- and they're not going to come back.  

This was a Ron Paul crowd. This was a Constitution Party crowd. This was a third party all the way crowd. Campaign for Liberty wasn't just helping out with the show-- this was their show, and any GOP candidate who thought guys waving "Pelosi Sux" signs were an automatic win, missed the zeitgeist of this group by a Bob Barr Country mile.

So back to Meghan for a moment, who probably does not speak for her father, the senator-- at least not entirely. She's still using far right icons Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham as foils in her huge and successful publicity barrage. And the 24-year old blogger and soon-to-be author told the Log Cabin convention that in a battle between the reactionary forces of the past (the Coulter/Ingraham wing) and the more progressive forces of the future, there's "a war brewing in the Republican Party."

Most of the old school Republicans are scared shitless of that future... I feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes…I think we're seeing a war brewing in the Republican Party. But it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past… I am concerned about the environment. I love to wear black. I think government is best when it stays out of people's lives and business as much as possible. I love punk rock. I believe in a strong national defense. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots and lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican.

Meghan complains Karl Rove is stalking her-- on Twitter; he's just a tweet-talkin' guy.

Not Just The Worst President In History, Also The Most Anti-Gay President In History

People in America are used to it but Brits were astonished enough so that one of their newspapers, The Independent ran a headline saying Donald Trump to become first president to speak at anti-LGBT hate group's annual summit. They were talking about that ValueVoters Family Research Council hate fest yesterday. "The Family Research Council," they wrote, "opposes and actively lobbies against equal rights for LGBT persons. The conservative Christian group campaigns against same-sex marriage, same-sex civil unions, LGBT adoption, abortion, embryonic stell-cell research, pornography and divorce. Every year the conference sparks controversy for its choice of speakers and in 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a legal advocacy organisation which specialise in civil rights, went so far as to classify the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group. Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, condemned President Trump's decision to address the event. 'By appearing at the Values Voter Summit, President Trump is lending the legitimacy of his office to a hate group that relentlessly demonizes LGBT people and works to deny them of their equal rights,' he told The Independent. 'His appearance puts the lie to his campaign promise to be a friend to the LGBT community. Bigotry is not an American value, and our president should speak out against it.'"

Coincidentally, the Daily Beast conjectured that the morons of the gay persuasion who were stupid enough to vote for Trumpanzee last year no longer see him as the great straight hope. He sure hasn't lived up to his ridiculous promises to be a champion for the gay community. (Exit polls indicate that 14% of gay voters-- all 14% sick, stupid and self-loathing-- pulled their levers for Señor Trumpanzee.)

The Trump administration’s record on LGBT issues has been defined by retrenchment, both sides concede. Many of the advances made under the Obama administration have disappeared, replaced by policies and directives that could have been written by an anachronistic social conservative instead of the cosmopolitan New York businessman occupying the Oval Office.

“I think, personally, the president has met my expectations,” said Chris Barron, a longtime conservative gay-rights activist. “My concern has always been what happens at the department and agency levels. And I definitely have concerns with what is going on at Department of Justice. The attorney general [Jeff Sessions] has a very different position on LGBT issues than the president does. But his job is to carry forward the president’s agenda and not push his own… I’m certainly concerned he is [pushing his own].”

Among gay-rights advocates, few had higher hopes for this White House than Barron. He was largely responsible for arranging for Trump to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011-- an event credited with helping bring the reality TV star into the GOP mainstream. And though the activist occasionally soured on Trump’s campaign, Barron also launched an LGBTers for Trump group and championed the argument that the Republican nominee would be inherently better for the community than Hillary Clinton. After the election, Barron wrote that Trump would be an ally, friend, and advocate.

Instead, Barron and others are alarmed at the direction the administration is taking. Trump is responsible for some of it, having signed a directive banning the recruitment of transgender troops. But much of it has originated from his agencies. The Justice Department has changed its position on whether sexual orientation is covered under the Civil Rights Act, withdrawn federal protections for transgender kids in schools, and said it will not prosecute organizations who cite religious objections when declining to serve gay customers.

Recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly withdrew a 2014 rule that would have required longterm-care facilities to recognize same-sex marriages when deciding visitation rights and decision-making responsibilities. The agency argued that the legalization of same-sex marriages by the Supreme Court made the ruling moot, but advocates warned that it would open the doors to discrimination. This week, the National Park Service abruptly decided to withdraw its sponsorship of New York’s pride flag, which had been dedicated at the iconic Stonewall National Monument.

“Trump’s supporters like to say, ‘It’s not what he says, it’s what he does that matters.’ That’s definitely the case when it comes to issues affecting LGBT Americans,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, who started the now-defunct conservative gay rights group GOProud along with Barron. “I never thought that Donald Trump was an anti-gay homophobe. I certainly didn’t think that when I met him back in 2011. But we’ve all learned a lot about who he really is since then. With his political pandering and posturing to endear himself to the intolerant wing of the GOP over the last few years, it doesn’t surprise me that this administration will go down as the most anti-LGBT in history.”

It gets better. Oh... and does Mother know?