Ed adds a nice commentary at the end of his latest post [1], detailing James Richardson’s call [2] for the GOP to get real and stop pandering to ignorance and bigotry:
The country has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. With more and more gay and lesbian Americans coming out of the closet, most people not only know gay people, they know that they know them. And they usually like them. That is a powerful antidote to bigotry. It becomes much more difficult to believe in an evil gay agenda to destroy the country when you know actual gay people. They become something other than a distant abstraction, they become real people with the same problems and flaws and concerns as everyone else.
That’s why every survey shows that young people not only aren’t as bigoted as their parents and grandparents, they find such bigotry offensive and unnecessary. And over the next few decades, those are the people who are going to run the country. If the GOP really wants to stick with the anti-gay stuff to pander to the religious right, 2008 is going to repeat itself over and over – with the only people supporting them being those over 65.
My thoughts precisely. Even if you completely forget the fact that gay-bashing or homophobic bigotry – or however you choose to re-label it to make it easier for yourself to swallow – is anti-human, anti-democratic, ignorant and just plain wrong, keeping it as a vote-attracting tactic as the US evolves into a more accepting society is going to hurt the GOP in ways that many of the current brains trust probably can’t imagine (but then, Cheney’s Whitehouse has only ever been concerned with what can be squeezed out of America & the world in four-year chunks and has looked no further). Societies inevitably evolve, and political entities must adapt or be left on history’s scrapheap.
Of course, it goes without saying that there are much better reasons to treat gay people as human beings than simple political tactics, but hey – this is the Republican Party of 2000-2008 we’re talking about here. James Richardson isn’t the first Republican, nor will he be the last, to know an epic fail when he sees one or to call for a major shake-up in how the GOP does business. It isn’t just the recent election loss that’s catalysed this dissent in the ranks though – the abject failure of the hateful, lie-riddled McCain/Palin campaign was just icing & a cherry on the hateful, lie-ridden cakewreck [3] of the entire Bush era.
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