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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at 10:14 and is filed under marriage, misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.