Our instruments have no way of measuring this feeling
Chris Crain has posted on the Washington Blade blog about the problems with gay PR, though he doesn’t exactly put it that way:
Then remember this: We gay Americans do not have the luxury of intolerance. When it comes to minorities, we are remarkably minor. Kinsey was nice enough to propagate the 10 percent myth, but subsequent surveys place us at even smaller numbers, well under half that amount. And about one-quarter of us — of us! — voted for the election and the re-election of George W. Bush.
If we cannot tolerate the viewpoint of someone who tries to explain why one-quarter of us like and support the president, then how can we expect the 96 percent of Americans who are heterosexual to listen seriously to our demands for equality?
The growing polarization of American politics has taken root within gay America as well. The explosion of liberal gay bloggers, many of whom spend about as much time on the “gray” of most issues as Rush Limbaugh and his “dittoheads,” has only exacerbated the proud queer tradition of disdain for gay Republicans (“Nazi Jews”) and the caricature of conservative Christians (“religious right,” “religious political extremists”).
Whatever the public opinion surveys may say about the growing acceptance of gays, we have lost, and lost badly, every ballot measure to date on marriage, and the numbers haven’t improved since Alaska and Hawaii voted on the issue almost a decade ago.
Our activists groups have grown quite fond of talking about the “conversations” we need to have with straight America. Well half of that conversation involves listening, not talking. And if we won’t even listen to the heretical views of our own kind, then how can we be open to one of “them”?
He’s right. I do think that while the subject is open, though, we might make a request of the conservatives, too: some of you have a real chip on your shoulder about what a brave, exclusive little club of dissenters you are. If you don’t knock it off, you’re going to have a hard time winning over rank-and-file gays who despise the shrill left but are wary of Republicans.
Yes, yes, yes, I know–there are gay enclaves in which you risk vandalization of your property if you’re openly conservative. More commonly you just risk being demonized. (That overused word strikes me as being appropriate here for once.) I’m more than happy to acknowledge that the outrages committed by extreme gay leftists are way worse than the smugness of some of the gay right. But smugness is a turnoff, and as long as the center-right range of gays stays so firmly a minority, it’s going to remain easy for lefty activists to claim to represent gays en masse.