Blogcabin California

As gay Republicans, I am sure all of us in Log Cabin have been told at one time or another that we’re oxymorons. San Diego’s Gay and Lesbian Times explores the idea:

In 2004, President Bush’s victory is credited to strategically placing the issue of same-sex marriage on several key state ballots (Missouri, New Mexico and Ohio, to name a few), thus drawing out a conservative base. Bush also supports a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman. In what was a first for the national Log Cabin Republicans, the organization chose to withhold its endorsement of President Bush, the Republican candidate.

Just recently on “Meet the Press” with Tim Russert, the Reverend Jerry Falwell said of Marc Cherry, the creator of “Desperate Housewives” (who self-identifies as a gay Republican), “If he’s gay and Republican, then the first thing he should do is join the Democratic Party.”
And if you think that sounds hostile, wait until you’re sitting at a dinner party surrounded by gay friends and announce that you’re a Republican.

Or, at least, so argues Garrick Wilhelm, president of the San Diego chapter of Log Cabin Republicans and the California State Board technology director.

“When I was coming out, I naïvely thought I would be accepted and feel free to be myself,” says Wilhelm. “But in the gay community, I have to be just as – or more – careful about making the decision to disclose that I am a Republican than I do in the straight community disclosing that I am a gay man. There is a tremendous hostility toward gay Republicans in the gay community.”

This dual rejection encountered – as a homosexual in the Republican Party and as a Republican in the gay community – is what Angela D. Dillard, a professor of history and politics at the Gallatin School at New York University, calls “double marginalization” in her book Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. Dillard offers, as she says, “a comparative analysis of conservatism which today cuts across the boundaries of sex, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.” The purpose of the book, argues Dillard, is to challenge the very notion of the conservative party belonging only to middle- and upper-class heterosexual white men.

Dillard’s book takes a broad look at members of minority groups who associate with conservatives, most notably Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Linda Chavez and Phyllis Schlafly. Dillard allows each of these individuals to tell their own story of how they reconcile their minority status with their conservative politics. For example, she argues that many African-American conservatives have rallied against inner-city poverty. While Dillard is more successful in her argument when it comes to race and gender, there are some interesting anecdotes regarding gay conservatives, including a chapter on “Strange Bedfellows: Gender, Sexuality and ‘Family Values’” in which Dillard explores the double marginalization that many homosexual conservatives feel.

The fact is, according to Jeremy Hawthorn, a local gay Republican, that you can see these scenarios above in just about any minority group of the American population. The notion, says Hawthorn, that Republicans are heterosexual white men in middle- to upper-social class positions is simply outdated.

So how do you feel? Are gay Republicans oxymorons or are those who throw the term around oxymorons, without the “oxy”?

Gay Republicans – an oxymoron? [GLT]