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    Won’t you listen to me when I’m telling you / It’s no good for you

    Steve Miller at IGF links to this new piece Rich Tafel has in NRO about Bush-voting gays:


    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.





    Tafel, former head of Log Cabin Republicans and a knowing political operator (I don’t mean that as a dig in this case), doesn’t put it as bluntly as he might have–for instance, “Gay activists and journalists seem to be standing around and asking, ‘Why the hell didn’t you guys do what you were told?'”



    This is funny in light of an encounter I had the other night (in the same place, actually, where I was granted my first taste of this holiday turkey). I was sitting–one of the reasons I usually don’t post about these things is that it’s hard not to give away other people’s personal information, so I’ll limit it to this–between a Muslim who has US citizenship but was brought up in one of the more Westernized countries in the Middle East, on the one hand, and an East Asian guy who’s lived since childhood in various big cities in California’s San-San population belt, on the other. The Muslim man was in his late 40’s, at a guess, and the East Asian was maybe 21.



    The conversation was lively, and at some point, someone brought up the election. Each of us was pleasantly surprised to hear that the other two had voted for Bush, and we spent quite an interval talking about the arguments we’d had with friends and the campaign messages that had and hadn’t reached us. It was fascinating, because here you had a Muslim who divides his time between America and Asia–you know, very cosmopolitan and stuff–and a kid from coastal California who works in the entertainment industry, and both of them just seemed to want to know, What was it that Kerry planned to do? How was it going to be better than an imperfect but predictable Bush? And why was it assumed that they were going to be pulling the lever for the Democrat out of some sort of homo predisposition? Tafel nails the more specific issues, too:


    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.





    I doubt every gay voter who went for Bush agreed with every single one of these, but the overall characterization strikes me as sound. The problem isn’t that reflexive-lefty gays haven’t brought their own beliefs in line with ours since the election. It’s that they still don’t seem to be able to fathom our reasoning at all.



    A decade ago, I was in college in the same city as Camille Paglia was teaching in, and her highly-publicized rants about loony-leftism really made me feel better about coming out. You know, the LGBA (which doubtless has a few more letters in its name by now) was full of JCrew types bleating about oppression. I went to one meeting and never went back, but it didn’t rattle me too much. Paglia and her media followers really looked as if they might generate enough force to break queer activists out of their calcified ways of thinking.



    It didn’t turn out that way. She certainly had her effect–along with others–but it was to peel off the closet moderates and make them more comfortable returning to the common-sense middle. The wacko leaders who are the real problem haven’t moved at all. It’s a shame.

    10 Responses to “Won’t you listen to me when I’m telling you / It’s no good for you”

    1. Dean's World says:

      Thursday Link Roundup

      LaShawn Barber asks, should bloggers allow comments, or not?

      Sean Kinsell recently discovered that amongst his group of friends, he

    2. Dean's World says:

      Thursday Link Roundup

      LaShawn Barber asks, should bloggers allow comments, or not?

      Sean Kinsell recently discovered that amongst his group of friends, he

    3. Dean's World says:

      Thursday Link Roundup

      LaShawn Barber asks, should bloggers allow comments, or not?

      Sean Kinsell recently discovered that amongst his group of friends, he

    4. Let the real victory be a symbolic one!

      Via Bill Quick, I see a wonderful opportunity for wolves who like to dress in sheep’s clothing (hmmm…. maybe that’s only-in-San Francisco sheep in wolves’ clothing….): San Francisco supervisors want voters to approve a sweeping handgun ban that wou…

    5. nathan in tokyo says:

      sean,
      another excellent post. i really ought to be looking at your blog more often!
      since the election i have had to put a lot of effort into explaining to both my younger brother and a dear old friend (both of them gay) that my vote for bush was in no way a vote against gay rights. it is an issue about which i was certainly listening to both candidates closely during the campaign and debates, and i came to the same conclusions about it as you and the two guys you mention above.
      making my brother and my friend understand this is very important to me, but i am not sure that i succeeded in making them understand my reasoning.
      i have always considered myself and been told by gay friends many many times that i am one of the most gay-friendly straight guys they have ever known and it is a source of pride for me (no pun intended!), so it has been very frustrating for me to have to explain myself like this to the two of them.
      best wishes,
      -n-

    6. Sean Kinsell says:

      Given that not even gays can all agree on what policies would most benefit us while fulfilling our larger social responsibilities, it’s madness to expect any straight person to pass some kind of ideological-purity test in order to be considered queer-friendly. It’s not my job to tell you how to run your relationships with your friends–and still less with your family members–but if you’ve done your best to explain your position, and they refuse to understand, it seems to me that that’s their problem. This election was, for almost everyone, about trade-offs, and trade-offs by nature mean you don’t get everything you want.

    7. Mrs. du Toit says:

      and trade-offs by nature mean you don’t get everything you want.
      Next you’ll be suggesting that Santa will not be bringing me my Aga next year.

    8. Sean Kinsell says:

      Oh, no, no, no. What kind of heartless gay man would deny a woman her dreams of an Aga?

    9. Mrs. du Toit says:

      Oh, no, no, no. What kind of heartless gay man would deny a woman her dreams of an Aga?
      A straight one in disguise?

    10. Sean Kinsell says:

      Hmm. Maybe. Would the straight men study up enough before going undercover to have the advanced-level domestic-queen knowledge of the Aga? I think most of them would figure they could pass if they bought a cat, wore Hawaiian shirts, and took out the trash on both weekly pick-up days. Mention the Aga, and they’d probably reply along the lines of, “Uh…great. Yeah, I think my sister went to one of those Indian spirit-healing therapist guys for a while. Really helped her get centered.”