Pro-Gay Conservatives: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing?

Margaret Hoover, Fox News contributor and frequent guest on the Bill O’Reilly show, warns her fellow conservatives that the party’s hard line against gay marriage is un-Republican. And she did it, of all places, on the Fox News Forum.

Though her arguments seem compassionate and pro-gay, embedded at the bottom of her article was a calculating reminder to her peeps that there’s more at stake with the gays. I speak, of course, about the health of the Republican Party.

Hoover says, “The aforementioned arguments against Judge Walker’s Perry v. Schwarzenegger decision risk undermining legitimate conservative gripes about the judiciary and putting conservatism once again, on the wrong side of the latest chapter in American civil rights.”

Hoover foresees the Republican Party quickly turning into the equivalent of everybody’s racist grandfather — you might have respected him at one time, but now he just says offensive shit in public that makes the whole family cringe. While Hoover looks far into the future of the Republican Party, the more myopic of her crew focus on November. And believe it or not, they want to put the kibosh on gay-bashing, including the Prop 8 ruling, to focus on money, money, money. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the head of the RNC has repeatedly told Republican candidates to focus their candidacy on economic recovery because it is the number one issue on voters’ minds.

It seems that more and more, conservatives are learning a hard lesson that poor, dumb Target has had to grapple with this past month: ignore them or accept them, but don’t piss off the gays. The question is, can we trust or should we seek out politically motivated acceptance?

Whenever I read the arguments for gay rights as outlined by conservatives like Hoover, they all supply reasons that omit any sort of moral mandate for accepting us. The arguments aren’t that it is wrong to judge us as sick or perverted and that, in fact, we are born this way and our sexual orientation is in every way as virtuous and natural as heterosexuality. Devoid of any human element at all, indeed almost never mentioning the immorality of hating an entire group of people, should we applaud these ostensible allies or reach for those who seem to value our rights on a more basic level of compassion and understanding?

On the one hand, acceptance is acceptance. If we are willing to forgo the murky ideological stances that fuel conservative acceptance of gay rights, we might see equality much sooner and with greater force. In this scenario, “equality” becomes equivalent to a legal contract. Opponents of gays are forced to recognize our rights and must abide by them, but they can do so unwillingly and with aggression, bitterness and hatred. But there is another scenario, one that seems depressingly out-of-reach, where equality is something abstract and humanitarian. In essence, we might reject an overture from those who secretly hate us but love political capital. To achieve this, it takes a behemoth amount of strength from the gay community. Armed with equal parts patience and love, it would call for changing hearts and minds before we change laws. It’s the gay conundrum. If we accept the support of bigots-at-heart, we might get our long-awaited “equality.” If we wait for minds to change, we will remain unequal for much longer but might see a truer sense of equality.

Just as Margaret Hoover did, I predict Republicans will soon discover that treating Latinos like criminals, gays like abominations, women like baby-makers and the jobless like lazy-asses was probably not the greatest idea. As typically democratic-leaning groups like these fatten in political power and evangelicals’ influence slims like a gastric bypass patient, we’re going to see many more conservatives who miraculously switch sides to support gay rights. It will behoove us all to remember, when the time comes, why this is happening.

Some former gay-haters will evolve and change to understand our extraordinary community. But just as often, we will become political targets for a struggling party that is looking to recover its former glory. Regardless of the motivation, soon enough our political struggles for equality will be a chapter in social studies books and a horror story we will tell our grandchildren. At that time, we need to remember that our struggles are far from over. Even when we win the political war, we have an ideological one that hasn’t even found its legs.

Photo Credit: Evelyn Saenz