Op-ed: The Impossibility of Standing With the GOP
Who is really responsible for the anti-LGBT messaging that has been tied to the Republican Party?
BY Randy Robert Potts
October 16 2013 7:00 AM ET
I am a
knee-jerk conservative — I can't help it, I was raised that way. This
means that for the rest of my life, when I hear things on the news I
will first filter them through the eyes of my Reagan-worshipping
parents. Throughout my teens I rebelled against this and drew the hammer
and sickle on everything I could find in response. Throughout my 20s I
rebelled by reading the most liberal diatribes I could find and voting
for the most liberal politicians America had to offer, which isn't
saying much (we have no true Marxists in America — if we did, I would
have found them.) Throughout my 30s I tried to stop running away from
this fact and look it in the eye, take a deep breath, and stop being
reactionary, and that's where I am today.
The
same is true, essentially, about my being gay. I went through the same
stages: rebellion, denial, and, finally, a measured acceptance. This
means that in the few short years since I have been in the public eye as
a gay writer and sometimes activist I have tried my best to stay above
the fray. I try not to take sides politically, and to work with people
from both parties — I count as friends people in both the Log Cabin
Republicans and the Stonewall Democrats.
Yet Ta-Nehisi Coates
sharply points out
that it is not the outlier that defines a crowd but the silent majority
within it. Until now, I haven’t allowed the antigay outliers in
Republican politics to bother me much — the men like Rick Perry and Rick
Santorum who are so over-the-top antigay that they become a parody of
themselves. Eventually, however, the fun and games have to end. A party,
in this case the Republican Party, must stand up and loudly declare in a unified,
across-the-board way that their antigay rhetoric and actions do not
reflect the consensus of the party.
There
are years, even decades, perhaps, during which you might forgive a
party or a group for tolerating the outliers in their midst, and then,
finally, there is a point where it simply becomes too much, when the
outliers are suddenly the voice of the party and the supposedly nice,
well-mannered people in the middle aren't standing up.
When this happens, the outliers are no longer outliers.
I
don't know what it is exactly about this shutdown nonsense, but
something hit me this weekend when I saw the likes of Sarah Palin and
Ted Cruz storming a memorial that Ted Cruz and his party closed,
demanding that the other party reopen it, in a bizarre defiance of
reality, and calling the police who tried to maintain order
“brownshirts.”
Something hit me when I saw a man in this same group waving a
Confederate flag in front of a black man's house, a house that just so
happens to be the house where the President of the Vaguely United States
happens to reside. Something hit me last weekend when the Values Voter
Summit was held in D.C. and virtually every single bigwig of the GOP
was there.
From the podium you heard thinly disguised and not-at-all-disguised
homophobia and Christians saying they are losing their religious liberty
because their countrymen are suddenly asking them to treat LGBT people
equally. Something about all this made me literally nauseous. It made
the hammer and sickle I used to draw as a teenager seem so childish, so
small, in response.
What's happening to
the modern-day Republican Party is simply too big for caricature. It is
too big to laugh about or make light of.
When
the majority of Americans in every single poll in 2013 support marriage
equality and the GOP still signs up for the Values Voter Summit. you
sense that the Republicans are never going to truly open their doors to
gay people. Maybe they'll nudge it open just a crack and let a gay
politician here, a gay staffer there, squeak through, but they won't
support them in building a family, in adopting a child, in protecting
themselves from violence on the street. If a party cannot stand behind
gay people when it's easy to stand behind gay people, it will never
truly stand behind gay people — when a party cannot stand up with the
majority, the outliers are truly in charge.
I have seen the antigay outliers in the GOP — I grew up with these people. I have seen what they have to offer us as
they praise Putin
and what's going on in Russia. I know exactly what these outliers want
for us queer folk here in America. I grew up hearing them talk about
concentration camps for people with AIDS and deportation and
imprisonment; I grew up hearing the constant bullying and harassment
from the pulpit and the lectern and the easy chair.
As
the outliers take over what was indisputably, in the days of Lincoln, a
truly grand old party, I cannot stand by their side — there is too much
evidence that the inmates are running the asylum.
RANDY ROBERT POTTS,
grandson
of televangelist Oral Roberts, has worked with young people as a
teacher, social worker, and in the juvenile justice program. He is
responsible for The Gay Agenda,
a performance art piece designed for conservative America and profiled in Details
magazine. His current performance project, “Solidarity,” calling for
support of LGBT people in Eastern Europe and Russia, will be performed
October 18 in Dallas, Texas. Randy can be found on Facebook and Twitter @randyrpotts.
Make the jump here to read the full article at the Advocate
