President Barack Obama did as was expected in Wednesday’s State of the Union address and reiterated his intent to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military’s ban on outing service members.
Reactions within the gay community ran the gamut of optimistic to pessimistic, but most agree on one thing: They’re glad they didn’t vote Republican. In a shockingly inaccurate appraisal of the policy, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said, “This successful policy has been in effect for over fifteen years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels … now is not the time to abandon the policy.”
Despite the myriad of reports contradicting his statement, a wife and daughter that actively support the gay rights movement, the hundreds of millions of dollars DADT has cost the country, the thousands of mission critical army personnel ejected from the military and the tens of thousands still giving their blood for us while living in fear of the very country they protect, McCain feels comfortable holding his position on anti-gay issues.
Is McCain showing his age? Possibly.
But his flat-out refusal to accept documented information laid out before him is the symptom of a larger problem. As right-wing extremists wrest more and more control from their more even-tempered comrades, the Republican Party has adopted a sort of purist philosophy that forces either utter capitulation or exclusion.
Nothing illustrates this political dynamic better than the controversy surrounding the sponsorship of a gay Republican organization, GOProud, or the Conservative Political Action Conference scheduled in February. An offshoot of the Log Cabin Republicans, GOProud has on its Web site the typical laundry list of core conservative principles to the point that its ideology has about an 80 percent overlap with that of the fundamentalist organizations.
When it was announced however that GOProud would be co-sponsoring CPAC, a number of other sponsors threatened to boycott the event.
“The bottom line is that homosexuality is not a conservative value,” said Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the American Family Association. In the end, the organizers behind CPAC deigned to grant GOProud the right to co-sponsor the event on the condition that members not be allowed to speak for any reason.
“Whatever happened to taxation without representation?” said Jason Spitz, a gay Republican-turned-independent.
Added Amy Nguyen: “It’s hard to believe that so called ‘fiscal conservatives’ would put financially ruinous policies ahead of issues that would help America for purely ideological reasons, but it looks like that’s the case.”
Right-wingers have decided that the gay community is anathema to the conservative agenda. With the second year of Obama’s term beginning with the same promises he made last January, the GLBT community has little choice, but to keep stamping its feet and hoping to be heard.
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