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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (90895)	12/16/2004 8:48:24 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793835

Pro-Gay, Pro-Values, Pro-Bush A simple logic. NRO — Rich Tafel, former executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, is president of RLT Strategies and author of Party Crasher: A Gay Republican Challenges Politics as Usual. The one statistic confounding pundits in this election is the number of gays who voted for George W. Bush. Polls show that the president received anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million gay votes, up from 1 million votes in 2000 and double the number of gay votes for Bob Dole in 1996. This dramatic increase comes despite the fact that no gay organization endorsed him, no gay journalist editorialized on his behalf, and no gay leader supported him. The post-election conventional wisdom fueled by gay leaders and the media is that President Bush won because he gay bashed. This notion serves all of their purposes: Gays can maintain their image of themselves as hated victims and liberal sections of the media can salve their wounds by admitting that because of their own tolerance they failed to appeal to America's intolerance. Another perspective is that gay voters, like most swing voters, knew both candidates were saying things to get elected. The Kerry campaign thought that by opposing gay marriage, praising anti-gay-marriage initiatives, not showing up to vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment, speaking against a judge's pro-gay ruling in his home state, and making sure every American knew that the Republicans had a lesbian in their family, social conservative voters would be fooled. No one was. Social conservatives aren't the yahoos the Kerry campaign took them for. Senator Kerry became a cartoon of what the Left thinks of the Right. His team believed that by gay-bashing, church-going, and geese-shooting, Kerry could make conservative voters believe he was one of them. It didn't work. Gays didn't believe Senator Kerry either. They gave him a wink and a nod as if to say, "If you need to bash us to beat George W. then do it — anything to win." Gay journalists and leaders rushed to defend Senator Kerry's actions as politically astute. They too believed Senator Kerry was pretending to be a social conservative to get elected. Here was the crux of the election: No one, neither his supporters nor the swing voters, believed that Senator Kerry said what he believed or believed what he said. That's the moral issue that sank his campaign. Enough swing voters didn't trust Kerry no matter what they perceived his real beliefs to be. In contrast, President Bush summed up his position this way: "You may not always agree with me, but you know where I stand." In an age of spin, that statement at the Republican Convention probably made the biggest difference in electing George Bush president. Gays who voted for President Bush had a simple logic. They recognized that both candidates opposed gay marriage for political purposes. Their primary concern was the war on terror. They believed that we are engaged in a war for the future of our country and our way of life. They believed that the rise of militant Islam is a real and deadly threat. They believed that our country, with all its faults, is a force for good in the world. They believed that our enemy cannot be reasoned with. They believed that we needed a leader who understood the world in terms of moral values, and they didn't scoff when the president used the words "good" and "evil" to describe the battle against terror. They realized we've made mistakes, but also realized that the only thing worse than making mistakes is not even trying. Many gays understood all of this and voted for President Bush, showing that they are people as well as gay people and that they have concerns beside their group interests. They wanted someone who in the difficult months ahead would stand firm in his beliefs. Now that the election has passed, the part of the gay community that has built a movement on the demonization of Republicans will not engage in self-reflection. It will tell its followers that George W. Bush won because he gay-bashed. This will only convince the administration that it has nothing to gain from engaging the gay community in dialogue. A rigid standoff will ensue, and the gay community can look forward to four more years in the wilderness. nationalreview.com