Readers C and D noted the crazification factor is in teh gay:
In 2008…27 percent of gays voted for Sen. John McCain, as opposed to 22 percent of Jews.
The rest of the article is interesting, it threatens go down the “Republican party is a natural home for gays” rabbit hole (what the fuck does it mean when people say that about a group, does it mean that group consists largely of assholes?) but pulls back:
At that point, roughly half of the gay population will be men who are disproportionately wealthy; disproportionately childless; and likely less concerned with social issues, their primary one having been resolved. And what do we call wealthy American men who care about economic policies with a limited personal commitment to public education? Usually, we call them Republicans. (I’d expect lesbians to remain a strongly Democratic group, in part because they’re women.)
Most likely, gay Americans, like practically all Americans, will vote their self-interest and evolve across parties accordingly. There will be only one bizarre outlier that will continue, as Milton Himmelfarb put it 60 years ago, to “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
Jewish Steel
I am, in fact, 5% less crazy by volume.
WereBear
Is this advancement of a sort, wherein gay men are assumed to be just as likely to be selfish, entitled, assholes as straight men are?
Zifnab
Of course, what the article inevitably tap-dances around is the nearly universal lack of appeal that the GOP has outside the old white religious male demographic.
Gays, Jews, Hispanics, young people, women…
It’s a demographic parade of fail. But don’t let reality get in the way of the spin-spin-spinning.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“Well, Romney isn’t really one of those Republicans”
or: “A totebagger’s a totebagger, no matter how
smallgay or straight.”Patricia Kayden
There will be only one bizarre outlier that will continue, as Milton Himmelfarb put it 60 years ago, to “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
Who is this bizarre outlier?
Marc
Does self-interest include voting for people who despise you and portray people like you as predatory moral degenerates?
gbear
This gay man’s demographic: Hanging onto my middle class status by the skin of my teeth but still voting for every school referendum that’s ever been placed in front of me (who want’s to get old surrounded by a population of undereducated and unmotivated kids). Wouldn’t vote for a republican or libertarian if my life depended on it (except for Arne Carlson. I like Arne).
I want to start throwing punches when I read about how rich and selfish we are. Somehow I missed out on the wealthy gene. I got the Mott the Hoople gene instead. Damn.
canuckistani
What proportion of the gay population are members of GOProud and the Log Cabin republicans?
Jim C.
The entire article relies on a particular premise:
“If GOP moves toward Dem position, constituency could be a toss-up”
Well, no shit Sherlock. That’s the basic idiocy of treating gays differently than anyone else. If the GOP position is to treat gays exactly the same as straights, then you take the fact that the entire party is being monumentally dickish towards gay people off the table.
That’s like saying, “If the GOP moves towards the Dem position, the female constituency could be a toss-up”.
Duh. People vote based on the positions a party holds vis-a-vis how much those positions benefit them. Gay people don’t like the GOP because their current positions hurt gay people.
Take away the parts that hurt gay people and, magically, maybe gay people are less hostile towards the Republican Party.
What a dumb article stating the incredibly obvious.
Jewish Steel
What does Su…eh, never mind. I know what he thinks.
AA+ Bonds
Because half of all gay people are rich white men :D
What, why are you looking at me like that
dedc79
@Jewish Steel: Sullivan TODAY: “I’ve long thought that gay men are a natural fit for a non-bigoted GOP. We await one. And the wait seems to be getting longer.”
In other words – screw the whole foreign policy SNAFU, anti-environmentalism, anti-labor, etc… Once they stop hating on gays, I’ll go back to the GOP.
Ken
There’s a hidden assumption in that article: that at the future date when marriage equality is established, the Republican party will still exist.
KCinDC
Isn’t part of the reason gays are wealthier on average than the general population that wealthy people have less to fear from coming out of the closet? I’d imagine that as prejudice against gays wanes the wealth gap may wane too, as more people with lower incomes feel comfortable being open about who they are.
Ben Cisco
Sorry, totally off-topic but this:
Grover Norquist endorses Bobby Jindal as Romney’s running mate
There ain’t enough popcorn in the Alpha Quadrant for this trainwreck.
Please Mitt, make it so!
Cassidy
@Patricia Kayden: Richard
redshirt
@dedc79: ME ME ME! YOU LOVE ME!
greennotGreen
I am sick and tired of writers identifying “self-interest” as anything that will immediately increase the wealth of the particular “self” being discussed! It’s not all about money! How much money do you have to have to be able to ignore starving babies, and homeless mentally ill people, and the damn entire planet being murdered by her own children? You know what? My self-interest is being served when those assholes don’t shit the bed we all share!
redshirt
@Ben Cisco: Mostly boring, but not very white.
AA+ Bonds
This also assumes a ludicrous ain’t-gonna-happen transition where the conservative party will reluctantly endorse gay rights and thus become the complete equal of the liberal party when it comes to gay rights
I mean, David Cameron is pushing for gay marriage but look at how Conservatives actually shake out on gay issues
My guess is that the poll numbers on gay voters and the Tories will actually swing back toward the liberal party once the marriage issue is resolved, because then the comparison will be on other issues
Or, hell, look at racial issues in the U.S. and voting patterns as a result – the G.O.P. officially endorses anti-race-discrimination laws and is in favor of legal interracial marriage . . . but it’s the damndest thing, the racists still know which party to join . . . and so do racial minorities
taylormattd
Sadly, I agree with part of that. It’s beyond clear to me that a disproportionate percentage of my gay brothers in the blogosphere are rich, self-absorbed, white, and/or warmongers obsessed with Hillary Clinton
Jewish Steel
@dedc79: Like the sun rising in the east, is our man.
Splitting Image
Interesting how the writer takes it for granted that the GOP won’t be changing its attitudes towards women any time soon, but phrases it in a way that blames women for not changing their attitudes towards the GOP any time soon.
Calouste
It’s why Cameron is moving the UK from civil partnerships to full same-sex marriages. There are more votes he will gain on the gay side than he will lose on the anti-gay side (who don’t really have anywhere to go anyway).
Turgidson
@dedc79:
I posted in an earlier thread about Sullivan’s actually-kinda-sensible post about how Reaganomics was a fraud and Romney’s a wanker who’s running on a failed ideology.
But I appended my comment with “I’m sure he’ll say something stupid soon enough.”
Voila. He did, even faster than I expected. His only real beef with the GOP, it turns out, is the “God hates fags” plank of their platform. What a f’ing tool that guy is.
gbear
@dedc79:
Is that the republican version of a unicorn? What a dipshit Sullivan is. A week ago he was welling up in tears while listening to Obama say that he was OK. Today, well apparently he didn’t leave a trail of breadcrumbs along his trail of tears. He’s back to trying to sit at the table with people who think he’s cootie infested.
KCinDC
Of course most gays who have low taxes as their primary motivation are already voting Republican. It’s not clear why improvements in gay rights should cause those who are currently voting Democratic to stop caring about all other social issues, foreign policy, basing policy on science, or any of the myriad other reasons to avoid the GOP.
Mark S.
I’m actually more surprised at the only 22 percent of Jews voted for McCain part, considering that Republicans are so unbelievably pro-Israel. Geez, they do a lot better with Hispanics even though they offer them almost nothing.
batgirl
@Patricia Kayden:
Jews.
AA+ Bonds
I really don’t see an ahistorical revolution happening where those who are always first on the chopping block when conservatives need to spill blood in public suddenly decide to form a permanent alliance with their executioners
Gay people who join conservative parties do so with the understanding that “y’know, sometimes I need to be treated like a subhuman animal . . . for the sake of cutting food stamps for kids . . . it’s really a saintly thing that I’m doing”
I just can’t see this catching on
Brachiator
This is amazingly blind and narrow. Just astounding.
And there’s this additional oddity, that perhaps reveals much about the author. He assumes that wealthy American men are either single, and do not have wives and children, or else treat them like chattel who have no claim on his time or wealth. Maybe the author has been watching too much Game of Thrones.
AA+ Bonds
@Mark S.:
Like Eichmann was
Seriously, most Jews are smart enough to know that support for Israel among rank-and-file Republicans doesn’t come from a good long-run (or medium-run) place for the Jews
I mean, put aside the clear belief among fundamentalists / New Evangelicals that Israel exists to provide a battlefield for the bloody apocalyptic war of Christ against Satan
Even that whole “only democracy in the Middle East” line could turn around real fast in a lot of scary ways, which are pretty easy to imagine . . .
“I mean, it is such a great place, Jews, your Jew country that you can always move to, where you have your own Jewish state, and you don’t have to worry about how our Constitution makes Christian prayer in schools an absolute necessity . . . we can all get along so much better when we’re with our own kind . . . ”
Or, fuck, just go Ron Paul whenever it’s convenient: “YOU BETRAYED US WE KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN DON’T THINK WE DON’T REMEMBER THEM PROTOCOLS”
dedc79
@gbear: On a daily basis he’ll rant against the GOP’s anti-intellectualism, christianism (as he calls it), their obtuse foreign policy, their misguided devotion to blocking any tax hikes ever, and you would think it would be enough for hit. But apparently in the scheme of things none of that matters, if only the GOP wasn’t full of bigots.
Anne Laurie
@WereBear:
Every single gay man Andrew Sullivan remembers from his Oxbridge eating club was a natural Conservative. David Brooks says the same thing about every Congressman who stroked Brooks’ inner thigh surreptitiously at a posh DC event. Who are we mere progressives to argue with scientific observation at such an elevated level?
AA+ Bonds
In closing, there are plenty of places among the ranks of well-dressed wealthy liberals where rich white gay men can hang out and work to exercise their superiority over their supposed social inferiors and “rein in” crazy ideas like social welfare and feminism and generally make themselves into complete shitheads, if they REALLY want to
Republicans will be selling a Coke competitor that will be “Coke, only you have to check who is in the room first before opening or the can will explode” and, yes, a handful of people will probably view that as The Most Exciting Thing
dedc79
I think what disgusts me most of all is the implied selfishness of it – this idea that as long as the GOP is looking out for my personal interests then it’s alright with me.
I do not belong to what would commonly be considered to be a disadvantaged or persecuted segment of the population, but i’m no Republican. I view liberalism/progressivism as a belief system that prioritizes sticking up for those who are disadvantaged, discriminated against, and unable to speak up for themselves. I view liberalism/progressivism as a belief system that values the pursuit of knowledge, scientific understanding, tolerance, equal opportunity, egalitarianism, etc… Today’s republicans practice the antithesis of these values. If Sullivan’s attitude is that once the GOP drops their anti-gay bias he would return to the GOP, then I have news for him – he’s never left.
Suffern ACE
As it turned out, I had my political identity formed before the sexual one. I can think of few things less natural for me than going off on a rant against school taxes wondering if the world wouldn’t just be a better place if all of the countries would submit to our awesome guns.
Tokyokie
Yeah, once you get past the part about their wanting to kill all the gays, the Republican Party is the natural home for gays. Except that’s a mighty big part. And it’s not like their narrow-minded tendencies are only reflected in their wanting to kill all the gays.
Andree-Anne Desmedt
This article is so dumb it almost does not deserve any comment.
Given the gay-bashing stance of the GOP, I doubt very much that gays (besides the Log Cabin Republicans) will vote for anyone who claims the GOP mantle.
daveNYC
@AA+ Bonds: To be honest, an exploding can would be pretty exciting.
AA+ Bonds
David Brock wrote a lot in Blinded by the Right about the dubious perks of being an outed gay conservative, feted by just the right people in just the right places to send just the right message about Well We Can’t Possibly Be Bigots
He got sick of it really quickly
Andrew Sullivan hasn’t
If I had to lay money on who has had a serious change of beliefs and who is hovering outside the Klan lodge with quivering orphan eyes waiting to be let in, I know how it would fall
And really, I think people are selfish, but most of them are not suicidal, and being a gay conservative can only go so far from the Highlander Rule before other developments make sexual mores the best and easiest bit to exploit among “the masses”
Anne Laurie
@Splitting Image:
In the GOP mindset, we genetic defectives who lack a Y chromosome are not entitled to political agency. Men may choose — even those delusional men who fail to understand the economic calculations by which the GOP is always the RIGHT choice — but women should just vote for whichever candidate their husband/father/eldest adult son/church leader tells them. What, you think they generously “gave” women the vote so we could make our own choices, you anarchist commie?
eemom
Check out Driftglass on Sullivan from yesterday. Trust me, you will not be disappointed.
AA+ Bonds
@daveNYC:
Yes but the DSM-V well covers the sort of person who would prefer Explode And Kill Everyone Brand Cola every time he or she got thirsty
I just don’t line gay people up as one-to-one with self-destructive mental illness
(and I think a factor many liberals may be missing is how many educated conservatives do see gay people as demented neurotics who can be exploited, how they believe Dr. Ablow style stuff about how the true facts of homosexuality as mental illness have been suppressed by liberal academia, and this no doubt enters into backroom discussions of political strategy)
NotMax
Gee, I guess Warren Buffet, George Soros, Ben & Jerry, etc., etc., etc. are “outliers.”
Whereas Sullivan is simply an out liar.
cthulhu
This story has been written before (and often by the LCR). But there’s another fact about teh gays, at least currently: they are more urban than rural. And urban areas are largely Dem strongholds. I’m sure your standard cracker assumes that’s because of all the minorities but most cities still have white majorities. But these white majorities are not as afraid of their fellow humans and their different ways and are more willing to see the importance and power of the commons. I don’t see this effect changing anytime soon even if equal rights are achieved.
Comrade Dread
@greennotGreen: When they use the term “Self-interest” they generally mean it in the same sense as modern capitalists:
“Short-sighted decisions that bring an immediate benefit to me regardless of the long-term consequences because… screw you all, I’ve got mine now.”
We used to call people who acted that way selfish or a$$holes and look down on them.
Now we laud them as role models.
Xecky Gilchrist
And what do we call wealthy American men who care about economic policies…
Also, aside from the insightful things everyone else has pointed out, why does caring about economic policy automatically mean you agree with Republicans? Democrats have economic policies too, and even ones that work!
Citizen Alan
@Mark S.:
An analogy: Imagine that you have a brother or cousin who lives some distance away who you love dearly and who you are heart-broken to believe is on a self-destructive course. You learn that he has two neighbors who both claim to be his friends. They take turns bailing him out of jail, but one constantly nags him to give up the smack and straighten out his life, while the other gives him a ride to the next cocaine party. Which of the two do you think is the better friend for your brother? Which of the two friends do you wish to support over the other in the hopes that he will help your brother turn his life around?
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
My favorite take on how long the war on women have been going on comes from this devastating post at skepchick:
Clementine Churchill eloquently pwns a sexist dude – In response to a article about how women should be kept away from all politics, Clementine Churchill responds with the logical continuation of that line of thought. “Ought women not to be abolished altogether?”
As far as many in the extremist wing of the GOP are concerned, gays are also “one of the doomed.”
Redshift
@Mark S.: Republicans aren’t “unbelievably pro-Israel.” Our right-wing party is very pro-Israeli right wing, and has worked very hard to make that equate to “pro-Israel” in this country. But similarly to how conservative demonization of the word ‘liberal’ has resulted in there being more self-identified conservatives than self-identified liberals, it doesn’t actually change people’s attitudes.
Comrade Dread
@Anne Laurie: Well, come on, the whole country did stop being a libertarian paradise once you ladies got the vote.
No more starvin’ old folks. No more locking folks in factories. No more forcing the unemployed to dance for us and watching packs of them fighting over pennies we throw at them.
This country ain’t ever been the same.
AA+ Bonds
If we are talking numbers, why don’t we talk about how those who self-identify as gay on surveys are also more likely to fall in demographics for type of education that skew heavily liberal
Or would that mean we would have to talk about how much easier it sometimes is to say to other people and to oneself “I’m gay” when one has privilege in other parts of one’s life
Cacti
@Ben Cisco:
From your mouth to FSM’s ear.
Polygamist/Exorcist 2012!
Redshift
@cthulhu: And if you live in an urban area (or a denser suburban area) it’s harder to kid yourself that you’re living entirely by your own efforts, without any support from government services.
Turgidson
@AA+ Bonds:
Sullivan posts a fair amount about all the GOP clown car fail parade a we’ve been subjected to in recent years. Some of it even makes sense and seems sincere.
Is it all just an exercise in making himself feel better about his butthurt that they don’t want him or his “kind” in their club?
That post about how gays would love it there if the party would just stop hating gays makes me think the answer is an unequivocal “yes”.
Cacti
@Turgidson:
Sully just can’t accept that the GOP feels about him, the same way he feels about black people.
bemused
@Ben Cisco:
Well, that certainly would be exciting.
Chyron HR
@Ben Cisco:
Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God
I just realized–there is a non-zero probability of Romney picking a VP and then changing his mind afterward. How glorious would that be?
AA+ Bonds
@Turgidson:
I think he is genuinely convinced that the pain conservatives cause him is just a necessary part of being basically right, that it will pass or decrease to acceptable levels, that there is no organic connection between saying fuck you to widows and saying fuck you to gay people, that if gay people just prove their worth as individuals that it will address all the sadistic problems of authoritarian personalities when confronted with the weak or the strange
He is the sort of guy who gets really pissed off when you point out that Winston Churchill was a genocidal racist even by the measure of his own time
Nutella
@Mark S.:
Because most of them can distinguish between a pro-Israel stance and a pro-Likud stance. The fundigelical arm of the Republicans is pro-Likud, that is, very much against the long-term existence of Israel.
AA+ Bonds
I’m what you call a Winston Churchill conservative, the open-minded, strong-backboned type; I became a conservative when I was 35, just as Churchill described in my favorite quotation:
Errr I mean
Goddammit Willy you are goddamned fired
[this is the hill Andrew Sullivan seeks to climb –Ed.]
Suffern ACE
Assuming I have neither parents nor know anyone who might grow old someday – heck I might grow old myself – I fully support ending the social security ponzi scheme. I mean who but heterosexuals with children worries about taking care of parents or what will happen when they get old?
MAJeff
@KCinDC:
KCinDC Says:
Here’s the thing: we aren’t.
mdblanche
This whole article is based on the assumption that the GOP will be dropping its anti-gay rhetoric and policies after the next election cycle or two because… um, profit? I think articles like this are wishful thinking on the part of authors who would flip from D to R themselves if this type of rhetoric were to go away and are in denial about how that ain’t happening any time soon.
Comrade Dread
@Suffern ACE: Walmart will hire them at minimum wage.
And when they get too sick to go on, we can just shovel them out back next to the dumpster and leave them there as long as it takes to die naturally as Mammon intended.
FlipYrWhig
@mdblanche: See also The Simpsons, Disco Stu: “If these trends continue… ayyyyyy!”
Brachiator
@mdblanche:
How do you “drop” anti-gay laws that have been passed or changes to state constitutions? This would be like expecting a racist to say, “Yeah, we want to pass some Jim Crow laws, but we won’t enforce them after we win the election.”
I agree that the article tries to sell this BS, but nobody sane would buy it.
LanceThruster
To say, “A gay voting for a Rethuglican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders” makes sense if said bird knows that they won’t be the fryer in the pot.
I can have lots of my 1% lucre or I can have a piece of paper?
Hmmm. Let me cogitate on it.
Mino
@AA+ Bonds: Social Darwinism was very common in 1920’s England. Then they had the two war and larned to value those prols.
Cargo
I’m gay, and yes there’s around a fifth of my gay acquaintances who are Chickens for Colonel Sanders.
When I asked a friend of mine (who is “on the fence” about voting for Romney) about this I get a lot of hemming and hawing and, “I’m not a single issue voter”, “the Republicans really don’t do what the religious right says, they just use those promises rhetorically to get votes and then they ignore them the rest of the time”, “we need to cut the deficit, social security is dead anyways, none of those in our age group (he’s late 20s) will get any of it”, and “not saying I’m unsympathetic, but a lot of poor people are relying on government benefits they don’t really need, and if pressed they’d get jobs”
He “agrees with Obama socially”, he agrees with Obama’s hawkish foreign policy (he’s in the military, and likes drone strikes), he considers no President able to influence the economy in any meaningful way, and he’s not even a gun nut or particularly racist, as far as I can tell. He wants a smaller-government Republican and he thinks, against every possible shred of evidence, that Romney will do things like cut social security and medicare, and probably lower taxes (which are “a bit high”)
I just threw up my hands. he’s in the military, and gay, and out now because of DADT, that’s not even enough. I dunno what to say to him.
Visceral
@Patricia Kayden: Jews.
At the time, Episcopalians (i.e. establishment WASPs) were the demographic with the highest average income, while Puerto Ricans had the lowest. What made Jews outliers – and incomprehensible to conservative pundits – was that they were disproportionately rich but held viewpoints and voting habits that were more strongly associated with very poor and marginalized groups.
lacp
That article assumes an awful lot. He really doesn’t cite much evidence, although the gentleman who asked for his donation back from Willard’s campaign seems to be an example of what he’s talking about. I’m not sure how many people really fall under that category.
eemom
@Chyron HR:
Pretty effin glorious. And even gloriouser if he did it more than once — given his track record, even that is possible.
Cermet
Let me understand this – 27% of gays vote thug which means close to 73% voted demo-rat?! I’d never guess it be that high democratic! So gays have the same metally ill 27 percenters as the so-called normal population! Wow, never would have guessed. I guess those are the self hate gays.
Suffern ACE
@Cargo: You know, conservatives don’t do what they say they’re going to do when something Is there to stop them.
LanceThruster
@Cargo: Not much you can say to him. Voting rationales always tend to incorporate some varying % of nebulous magic factor “X” that pollsters have a terrible time trying to pin down.
Candidates providing less rather than more details benefit from the “they’re just like me” perception regardless of validity.
Chet
@dedc79: I love how Sully doesn’t even attempt to qualify that statement along the lines of, “I’ve long thought that gay men like me are a natural fit for the GOP”.
Because it apparently goes without saying that gay men are ipso facto affluent educated able-bodied cisgendered laissez-fairist chickenhawk neocon Caucasians who can’t be bothered to give a flying fuck about the well-being of nonwhites and women and poor people and the like.
RalfW
Good g-d. This piece of crap seems to be saying that gays will forget about 50 years of being treated like shit by conservatives in favor a a little sweet, sweet tax cuts.
News flash, gay people are not as craven as Republican leadership. Fucktoits.
Mino
@Cargo: Ask him to name one Republican after Ike that created a smaller government and reduced the debt. They just say that to get votes and then ignore it.
LanceThruster
@dedc79: In Masterpiece Theater’s “Private Schultz”, when the German High Command was scattering at war’s end, the officer insisted on a toast ~
“To the Third Reich!”
~ to which his long abused underling managed to utter ~
“It was fun while it lasted?”
Yeah, other than the gay hate, the modren Rethuglin Party is double-plus good!
bemused
@Cargo:
Those just sound like excuses, he’s a Republican and doesn’t want to come out and admit it.
irmaladuce
@KCinDC: That is a good point, something I have never thought of before.
Mark
You all have this backwards.
If you’re a straight white male, your are 55-60% likely to be a Republican.
If you’re gay, bump that down about 20% (the gay vote % for Republicans was even higher in 2010.)
So being gay = -20%, which is pretty big. Bigger than being a woman vs a man, for example. Let’s crawl inside the brains of the nearly 50% of women who voted (R) in 2010 before we crawl inside the brains of another group that is also hated by Republicans.
Steeplejack
@WereBear:
Definitely, in the sense that some gay men are selfish, entitled assholes and not all straight men are selfish, entitled assholes.
David Koch
@taylormattd: why are they absorbed with Hillary, as opposed to any other politician, such as Bill Clinton?
AA+ Bonds
@Mino:
2nd quote is from 1937 hoss
I mean I guess white folks got a pass? Not what I was talking about really when I used the term “genocidal racist”
You Get a Pass . . . From Churchill’s Racist Ass™
RalfW
@Suffern ACE:
Yeah, this. I figured out I was a liberal my sophomore year in college at age 18 (yes, I was a wee lad as a freshman), but I didn’t come out as gay until 24.
Can’t fathom ever being a Repub even if Michael Bloomberg paid for a $50,000 gay wedding for me and my man and the entire GOP had managed to recant every anti-gay thing they’d ever done.
The Republican party has been a complete mess since I was in diapers in the late 60s. (And reading that Truman quote in the earlier thread makes me think they’ve been a total disaster a lot longer than that).
Anne Laurie
@Cargo:
“With any luck, you’ll live long enough to realize how immature and short-sighted you sound right now.”
gex
Being white and being male trump a lot of other things. Being gay will become a smaller and smaller obstacle. And yes, at that point they are the exact demo the GOP targets.
Of note in the article is a tacit understanding of how the macho GOP doesn’t give a fuck about society. And how that really appeals to a lot of white men.
gex
Oh, and it’s not as though the GOP stopping saying they want to kill/jail/subhumanize gays will mean they change their opinion on the fact. If it starts hurting them, they WILL stop saying it. For votes. They also talk about bipartisanship because it gets votes. And I think that example makes my point quite nicely.
Bob2
I think he probably meant gay males he knows are natural fits for libertarianism, not the imaginary GOP he has in his head.
Also, did this thread bring out every single gay BJ poster?
Lojasmo
Houston, we have a problem.
Uncle Glenny
Also, did this thread bring out every single gay BJ poster?
No.
Nickws
@Patricia Kayden:
Apparently it’s the Jewish community, but like you I read it as referring to a particular individual or two, which in the context of an historical analogy made with today’s US politics had me thinking, “So, we’re going the whole hog and reclassifying Franklin and Eleanor as a gay couple, eh?”
burritoboy
Hilarious thing is: Jews were Republicans in the 19th and even into the early twentieth centuries. German Jews loved them some Abraham Lincoln. They just loved the guy. A lot of the guys who ran the Republican Party in Missouri during the Civil War were German Jews out of St. Louis, for instance. (And the Missouri delegation to the 1860 Republican convention was one of the key ones pushing for old Abe as opposed to his rivals.) We shouldn’t forget that it’s entirely unclear whether Lincoln was a Christian at all – he probably was a monotheist, but he wasn’t an obvious Christian either. But he knew his Old Testament backwards and forwards, and an agnosticky Old Testament monotheist is a guy who’s on the same general wavelength as a German Reform Jew of the mid nineteenth century.
They generally hated the Democrats because a lot of German Jews had fled Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, and they loathed slavery and the Slave Power (which was a far worse version of the serfdom still existing in Central and Eastern Europe of their day and they hated that stuff back in the old country too). That the Southern Dems were heavily into crap like the KKK kept lots of Jews away from the Dems into the 1910s and 1920s.