Gays in the Republican party and other inconvenient facts.

According to “Accuracy In Media”, via Marty Kaplan at HuffPo, "Republican Gays are Closeted Dems”. So, the Rethug party, after only just now "finding out" that their membership has gay members, fires back with the only weapon they have. Why, of course! Gays cannot be “real Republicans”! And, as everyone knows, “not Republican” equals “Democrat”.

Never mind that it has been rather common knowledge that the Republican Party has a fair number of homosexual members. Names such as the Lavender Bund are well known, and the Log Cabin Republicans have their own web site. Exactly why gays think they should be active members of the Republican party, whose overall philosophy toward gays could be classified as medieval, is a question I have long wondered about and has no convenient answer. But that is not the point here. Nor am I making any statements that gay people should not be politicians or be around children. The Rethug party does that plenty, and for them to try to turn that around on the Democrats making hay with the Mark Foley scandal is ridiculousness to the nth power.

There are two things going on with this disingenuous claim that closeted gays in the Republican party are actually Democrats. (I can’t even type that without shaking my head in disbelief.) The first is that this is the only way that many Rethugs know how to respond. Nothing is ever the fault of the Republican party and it will never, ever admit to any error in its’ methods, actions, or ways of thinking. However, this whole mess with Mark Foley and his terrible fondness for male pages is clearly their mess. The Democrats have nothing to do with this. However, that is their first and sometimes only weapon. Try to pin everything on the Democrats and/or President Clinton. So many Rethugs are giving it a go, in hope that some of it sticks.

The other thing that is going on is that many within the very conservative ranks of the Republican party had no clue that any homosexuals might be members of their party. And this, if it becomes a well known and documented fact (they could just try looking around for a bit), a lot of the base that the Bush and the Republicans count on is going to not be terribly motivated come election day. This scares the crap out of them. So, they must do anything to sling mud at their opponents and distract everyone from finding out the real truth. There are homosexual members of the Republican party and a couple of them have turned out to be sexual predators. This, for a party who has donned the cloak of moral superiority, hits home in several ways.

This, coupled with that nice new book from David Kuo, "Tempting Faith" about how Bush and his minions have taken the right wing conservative Christian branch of the party for a ride, has the makings of really undermining that thirty percent base for the Republican party. The hard-core “faithful” want to be myopic in their political views. New information is hard to process for them, especially information contrary to their “set in cement” views of the world. One can only hope that all this will finally break down their door of denial and expose how hypocritical Bush and the Republican party has been, and continues to be, regarding gays and lesbians.