My father was rather conservative on social issue things.
He was part of the “Greatest Generation”, and, let’s be honest, as these people came to middle age, they got hit with a lot of things they needed to adjust to, things that turned their world upside down in pretty short order.
When I came out, he went through what I would imagine many fathers his age went through, and that was wondering what had gone wrong, and whose fault it was that I turned out Gay.
Eventually he became somewhat accepting, provided I agreed to never bring it up unless I really had to.
Of course, this would occasion his questioning why I never filled him in on details of my life, and after declaring I could never bring another Gay person over, asking why, if there was nothing wrong with being Gay, none of my Gay friends ever came over to visit the family.
He was trying in his own way.
He didn’t want to know about it, but he wanted to know about it.
My mother asked a lot of questions and conversed about my life the same way she did about those of my siblings, and I often figured she would then relay information to my father so he could be informed without having to “talk about it”.
One night, while I was home visiting one Christmas, we sat on the big couch watching television together, and one of the shows like 60 Minutes came on. The topic was liberal views vs conservative ones on the same issues, and I got a little uncomfortable when Gay Rights came up because talking about something I was asked not to talk about was being done by strangers on television, and I wasn’t sure what it was I might have to handle if my father made some of his semi-humorous, often based on discomfort remarks.
He wasn’t ignorant or uninformed about what was going on in the world; he just didn’t want to discuss it.
The interviewer turned to one of the panelists and introduced him by name, and then noted that he was a member of the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of Gay Republicans.
My father suddenly turned to me and said with great surprise,
“Wait? You have those? No wonder you have a hard time getting stuff.”
Just as I had to once explain to him that, just because I was Gay, it did not mean I found every man attractive, I now had to explain that even though they were Gay, and as a Gay activist I was fighting for their rights too, I could not understand why they exist.
An acquaintance I have, who is a Gay Republican, once explained that he and his were fighting within the party that continually denies them their rights, and refuses to even acknowledge their humanity, so change could be brought to the Party from within.
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I won’t say which state this man and his friends live in, but their state legislature, which has become Republican controlled because of his votes and the votes of his friends, has grown so anti-Gay that it now has 27 bills in the works that reduce and deny the rights of Gay people, and allow discrimination to the point that youth suicide will be a logical consequence.
It was not easy explaining Gay Republicans to my father, let alone myself.
In this present presidential election cycle there has been a lot of anti-GLBT talk especially against Marriage equality, and most, if not all of it, because God is supposedly telling the Republican candidates what to say.
A person would think this would be a good indication to Gay Republicans that the Party just does not accept them, this along with their always being excluded from Party events and conferences unless they stay closeted and quiet.
Their disconnect is plain when, explaining their opposition to Hillary Clinton the Log Cabin Republicans point out that she was “wrong on gay rights when it mattered.”
They have based this on things she said ten years ago.
They seem blind to any growth on her part, while, it seems, refusing to acknowledge what Republicans are saying now.
Log Cabin Republican president Gregory T. Angelo stated that “Democrats and members of the LGBT community have given Hillary Clinton a pass on past transgressions and even allowed her to rewrite the history of the gay rights movement.”
The LCR put out an anti-Hillary ad in Iowa before the caucuses because, “We felt that urgency to do so now, obviously, with the Iowa caucuses looming, but also because other LGBT organizations have not done due diligence regarding Hillary Clinton’s past, and we felt we were in a unique position to step up in that regard.”
Yet, the LCR supports Republican candidates who not only still oppose marriage equality and remain committed to working against the settled legal question, but have ramped up their rhetoric.
The excuse offered by the LCR president?
“Naming a ‘better’ Republican candidate for president on gay rights is unrelated to setting the record straight on Hillary Clinton’s real record on gay rights, which Democrats and the LGBT community seem to be ignoring.”
Oddly, even though Mitt Romney opposed marriage equality as recently as 2012, LCR endorsed him for president.
And, even though Donald Trump declared he would strongly consider appointing Supreme Court Justices who would overturn marriage equality and accepted the endorsement of the very anti-Gay Jerry Falwell Jr., LCR’s president praised Donald Trump as “one of the best, if not the best, pro-gay Republican candidates to ever run for the presidency.”
This would have been impossible to explain to my father.