Here’s your quote of the day, courtesy of the queen of the GOProud Homocons, Ann Coulter:
Marriage is not a civil right. You’re not black.
I found it odd that in Politico’s coverage of this weekend’s GOProud gather that it would suggest that Coulter’s “presence marked the increasingly mainstream Republican embrace of gay rights.” From TalkingPointsMemo’s slightly more detailed report of Coulter’s remarks, it seems to me she proved just the opposite: despite new exceptions, the right is as anti-gay rights as ever.
What is a gay conservative? The answer is pretty generalizable from my observations. A gay conservative is a rich, white man who wants credit for being gay but cares more about the money the Republican party can help him hold onto. Men who are rich and white have it pretty good in this society, which means they can be out without much backlash. I get the impression—and have heard directly from others—that even despite identifying as openly gay, they are still straight-acting closet cases who require a fair amount of lubrication to be their true gay selves.
Reinforcing the stereotype that all gay people are rich, one of Coulter’s (apparently) funniest lines of the night was:
Blacks must be looking at the gays saying, ‘Why can’t we be oppressed like that?
While it might be a thing of the past, I don’t know that there was ever quite the phenomenon of black people being convinced to oppress themselves.
These Homocons are a danger to themselves, though they’d surely assert the opposite. They are applauding as someone stands in front of them and calls them “less than.” That is not healthy. Just read this post from a conservative with same-sex attractions. This poor guy has been convinced that acknowledging he is gay means that he’s going to magically turn in to Jack McFarland and lose his whole identity. He sees his SSA as a “challenge in my life that I have to deal with.” He’s been fed archaic notions about males being complementary to females, as if that idea had some important significance (of course, the Catholic Church thinks so). I think SooperTrev is right about one thing: he’s not hypocritical. He can have traditional views on homosexuality. A lot of them are wrong, ignoring decades of psychological research about the phenomenon of sexual orientation, but that’s besides the point. He is clearly causing himself more pain.
Cognitive dissonance is not something we should applaud. If these Homocons think they’re doing the gay rights movement a favor, then they have some very mixed up ideas going on in their head that give me concern for their mental health. My hunch, though, is that they think they’re doing the Republican Party a favor by offering them a supportive representative authority from the gay community, which simply makes them self-serving Quislings.
At the end of the day, gay conservatives care more about their money than about their identity. They have enough money that they don’t face the challenges of being gay. Rather than ever having to wrestle with those challenges, they are intent to continue accumulating the money necessary to maintain their standard of living. In doing so, they remind us that coming out is still very difficult in our society and that we have a long way to go when it comes to educating and achieving respect from society. I can’t help but see them as slaves who think that if they can just save up enough money, they can buy their freedom. They fail to see that freedom from oppression has never been up for sale.
If anything, they deserve our pity. Unfortunately, they’ll be hard-pressed to find it as we angrily work to undo the damage they do to our community in their desperate search for acceptance through greed.
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If you’re curious about what LGBT people lose by support social conservatives, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund has a new video up today to remind you:
