I've spent the morning visiting various conservative blogs and checking out Jonah Goldberg's editorial at the Chicago-Tribune (in which he hilariously asserts that he "doesn't carry water for the GOP").
The new meme is that Democrats are hypocrites because they are critical of a GOP leadership that smears gays, yet apparently employs them in spades. What’s hysterical about this immediately is that they are lying on the face of it. Democrats have not been critical of any such thing. If anything, they have quietly snickered at the supreme irony of this scandal.
Repugs have for years conditioned their base to hate gay people, to loathe them so much they were willing to pass laws prohibiting them from some basic rights. They have been fed a steady stream of hateful rhetoric about the gay “culture war,” implied that gays recruit (the height of projection, since that’s what all those evangelical ninnies do), and that they are pedophiles in pursuit of Your Children®.
That the Foleygate matter threatens to out apparently a legion of powerful gay House aids means this base, blind and small as they now are (the 30% evangelical base and about 5% more of just plain out stupid Repugs) will naturally turn on them. It gives new meaning to Ouroboros. Ultimately, and sadly, may be the real straw that’s breaking this camel’s back.
Naturally Dems are gonna snicker. And naturally, thin-skinned Republican wusses are gonna be offended, just like they were in the school yard every time they got beat up (nobody postures as much aggression as the GOP without a history of getting a beating). What Dems aren’t doing is demonstrating any kind of hypocrisy in their stance toward gays. Not that it'll matter since the POV comes from a fledgling blogger from Southern Indiana, but let's set the record on this nonetheless.
The majority of Democrats—both voters and leaders—believe in actual, realized equality. As such they support the full dispensation of rights for citizens. Of course this means that they support gay rights and gay inclusion in society. Gay marriage, equal opportunity, etc are issues of interest to Democrats and gays are an important constituency for them. Democrats have not changed their opinion on any of this. They remain as committed to the cause of equality for gays as they ever were.
They would be, however, stupid not to point out that the GOP isn’t, as well as the fact that Republican congressmen in positions of highest authority employ known gay people, but have hidden that fact from their constituents at home. Democrats do not approve of the fact that this riles the ever-shrinking base of the GOP against the GOP. But they are not changing their opinion on gays. And they aren’t being hypocritical—the GOP is. When you got nothing and have been exposed for the dirty, lying bastard you are to the people who love you most, project, project, project in hopes of saving your own ass. And now the base at home—who always knew the Repugs were lying, but thought they were only lying in order to fulfill a righteous (yet curiously unsupported by the general public agenda)—know they themselves have been lied to. <snicker>
