An essay in the LGBTQ Nation online magazine has hammered Republican members of their tribe, insisting that they vote “against their own community.”
Arguing for unthinking homogenization into a single voting bloc, an essay in the San Francisco-based news magazine calls the existence of LGBTQ Republicans “one of the enduring mysteries in politics.”
In his December 17 essay titled “Why are some LGBTQ people Republicans?” John Gallager says the GOP “caters to the religious right, which is working to roll back LGBTQ rights,” and judges LGBT Republicans traitors to the cause.
One problem is that “gay and lesbian Republicans don’t feel that their sexuality is that big a deal,” Gallagher writes, citing a study by FiveThirtyEight which found that “most LGB Republicans see their sexuality as separate from — or secondary to — their political identity.”
Contrary to gay and bisexual Democrats, who consider their sexual proclivities “a very important aspect” of their identity, a 2020 study from the Williams Institute found that “54 percent of LGB Republicans said their sexual orientation was an ‘insignificant’ part of their identity,” Gallagher writes.
“My sexual orientation being gay is just a tiny part of me and doesn’t really affect where I stand politically,” one respondent told FiveThirtyEight. “I think the Democratic Party tends to pander too much to various groups, and I think we should look at people more as individuals than as part of a group.”
Some LGBs are drawn to the Republican Party because of business and economic issues, Gallagher laments. “But as the party moves away from having any platform at all to simply become a venue for Donald Trump and his grievances, it’s harder to justify support on policy grounds,” he insists.
Interestingly, FiveThirtyEight said that many of the LGB Republicans they talked to said that they felt “personally welcomed as gay or lesbian in Republican circles, while they often felt ostracized as Republicans in LGBTQ circles,” Gallagher notes, with no apparent sense of self-irony.
Indeed, what seems to bother Gallagher is that certain LGBTQ voters thoughtfully weigh a number of issues before casting their votes, instead of voting in lockstep “the way they are supposed to,” an idea similar to Joe Biden’s presumptuous and demeaning 2020 comment that if you fail to support him “you ain’t black.”
It would seem that according to a certain mindset, independent thinking is not a quality to encouraged, but a vice to root out.
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