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Jul 28, 2011
What’s more important – your tax rate or your sexual orientation? Would you give up love and/or sex forever for a smaller government?
These questions should be no-brainers. No emotionally healthy person would trade something as humanly essential as physical love and affection for a discredited chance at personal economic gain.
Yet in 2010, roughly one-third of gays and lesbians voted for Republican candidates, helping the party sweep into power in Wisconsin and elsewhere. The overwhelming majority of these candidates were not social moderates working for the common good. They were not “Rockefeller Republicans” or libertarian “Goldwater Republicans.” They were lunatic fringe Republicans who owe their political allegiance to the evangelical right.
The evangelical right has a clear agenda: to criminalize consensual same-sex relations and push us back into the closet.
As a sideline, they also want to reduce the size of government and eliminate taxation. But even if you’re an LGBT person who agrees with their sideline positions, can you justify helping people who seek to annihilate you to gain power?
No doubt some LGBT people who voted for the sworn enemies of their own freedom were either self-loathing or misinformed. But the majority of them were intentionally self-deluded. They believe that the anti-gay posturing on the right is merely empty rhetoric – de rigueur pandering to a core GOP constituency. They fail to see it as a real threat.
Perhaps they need a stroll down history’s memory lane.
The early National Socialists in Germany preached only moderate anti-Semitism. That’s something Jews had experienced for centuries in Europe, so it was of no great concern to many of them, especially those who were German nationalists and WWI vets. Many of these patriotic Jews threw their support to the Nazi party, believing its leaders could fix the disastrous German economy. They dismissed the familiar anti-Semitic rhetoric as innocuous.
Sound familiar?
Holocaust comparisons are by nature overblown. It’s unlikely that contemporary America would round up and slaughter any group of people. In fact, it’s the very example of what happened in Germany that would help to prevent this from occurring again.
But it’s hardly a stretch to imagine a steep backward slide for LGBT people in this country. Our social gains are very recent and tenuous. Many of us vividly remember the bar raids, the job dismissals, the constant pressure of living in an unapologetically homophobic world.
It is neither paranoid nor overblown to imagine a return to this way of life. Just witness what’s happened to women’s reproductive freedom just since the 2010 election. In some states, many women now have virtually no access to family planning services, including affordable birth control. In other states, including Wisconsin, the newly empowered GOP fringe is desperately trying to roll back LGBT rights.
Hopefully, there will come a time when LGBT people have the luxury of voting on the basis of other considerations. But that time has not come yet. In fact, it will only come if we oppose those who fight against our rights and support those who support us.
