LGBT News GOProud founder leaving Republican party in part over ‘tolerance of bigotry’

Seems to make more sense than associating yourself with Republicans. I don't know how anyone could justify doing that considering their stances on gay rights and the sheer amount of completely insane people who represent and make up that party.

 

Always thought it's embarrassing the # of gays (about 25%)/gay supporters who vote repub. You don't want to vote dem, i get that, all good, but *don't* enable that kind of bigotry.

 

the problem seems to be when more moderate republicans leave the party the more the party becomes a haven for the bigots.its great if you want the democrats to win with ease. but yea im pretty thankful i live in a nation where i have a range of choices in parties.and even our right wing parties have a majority of politicians supporting equal rights often very strongly.

 

So even the GOProuders are abandoning the sinking ship that is the Grand Old Party. Jimmy LaSalvia just now finally got his head out of his ass and realized that his party is built upon bigotry?

I hope it's indicative of a wider trend of delusional gay Republicans finally waking up and realizing that the Republican Party hates them for who they are just as much as it hates gay liberals.

I agree it was embarrassing in 2012 still seeing 22% of LGB voters cast their ballots for Mitt Romney, a man who supported a federal constitutional amendment that would have permanently repealed and banned marriage equality in every state and possibly have struck down every gay rights law in the nation. We need to get that number down into the single digits, queer people voting Republican just doesn't make sense.

---------- Post added 15th Jan 2014 at 08:55 PM ----------

The "moderate Republicans" left the party a long time ago. There are no moderates left in the GOP. The moderates are now with the moderate party, the Democratic Party.

So basically we don't have any real choices to make on the ballot, only two parties have a chance of winning, and one of them is completely evil and horrible.... so indeed consider yourself lucky to live in a country with a better political system and better parties!

 

Well, I agree. The Republican party does tolerate bigotry. In fact, it does more than that. It promotes bigotry. (In the best case, it merely tolerates bigotry.)

Still, I think queer folks need to understand that neoliberal corporatism doesn't benefit them. You can be a "conservative" and queer, but that's definitely a blind spot--a kind of selective politics...

 

Time to make a contrary opinion.

Democrats. Moderates. XD Obama and co. seem very liberal to me. (He's not the best president and not the worst. That is my opinion.) What would you consider left, if Democrats are not?
I'm curious.

I'm only in high school, but I've encountered conservatives, moderates, liberals, and have encountered political stances of all types.

It's not black and white! Not all Republicans are "bigoted", and not all Democrats are super accepting. Take my parents, for example...

It's not Republicans on their own (Republican fiscal policies are good- probably why gay people voted for them)... It's the Santorum-esque paleocon types who are getting butthurt over minor issues. To be frank, I view them as a vocal minority type. Most people tend to be near the center of the political spectrum, don't they? I'm probably going to stay a Conservative Libertarian until the GOP's current audience becomes more understanding. Trust me, it will happen. Values change with time, and LGBT people have been falling in and out of favor for all of human history.

 

The Republican Party is the far-right party. The Democratic Party is the centre-right party. Democrats are the party of moderates, including Obama, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, etc. Republicans are the party of extremists, including Romney, McCain, Palin, Cruz, etc. There is no left-wing choice in America's two-party duopoly.

All the people who used to be "moderate Republicans" are now Democrats, making the party into even more of a moderate party than it already was.

 

Actual left-wing politics would be stuff like

advocating single-payer healthcare coverage and abolishing health insurance

enshrining in law the right to collective bargaining for all workers

the nationalization of collapsed banks

a minimum wage tied to inflation and the standard of living

complete subsidization of tertiary education or charging for tertiary education only after the student has finished their education and has a steady job

abolishing laws giving employers the right to fire "at will" for any reason not explicitly prohibited by law

reducing our armed forces to a tenth of their current size and withdrawing from all pseudo-wars currently in progress

strengthening the power of the UN and working to abolish the veto power of the permanent members of the UN Security Council

mandating maternity leave and paternity leave for all employees

and so.

You can agree or disagree as to whether these are good policies, but those are actual left-wing policies.

 

Democrats\Obama are actually pretty centrist, center-right if anything. He's incredibly right-wing on alot of issues, more so than Bush even. They'd basically be Republicans 20 years ago. It's just that the right keeps going further to the right with each day, what was the "center" 20 years ago is completely different than what it is now.

I mean yeah Democrats are more "liberal" when it comes to Social issues (not really though, libertarians are much more liberal than Democrats\Obama on social issues), and maybe some things such as social programs (I wouldn't even say that, but it seems like just tolerating the programs and not wanting to completely gut it is a "liberal" position nowadays), but when it comes to a lot of other issues they're pretty similar to Republicans and the establishment.

And I would consider the "left" to be along the lines of Elizabeth Warren\The green party.

And yeah, this guy summed it up :

 

Can't say I am a fan of those policies.
But I appreciate the explanations.
Thanks, Mogget.

 

The US democrats are still to the right of many European center-right parties. You can have whatever disagreement you want with the Political Compass. But the fact remains, at a certain point, how ever you measure the "socialist-capitalist" and "libertarian-authoritarian" scales, the Republicans and Democrats are frustratingly close.

I won't pretend there are no real differences between them. And sometimes, the differences are important. For example, if Gore had won in 2000, there are Iraqis wouldn't have been murdered by our government.

Nevertheless, the "median" political opinion is more capitalist and authoritarian in the US than in most of Europe, and there is VERY little deviation from the median in the US, and there is generally more deviation in European governments on the Westminster system.

 

At the end of the day, on one who is or supports lgbtq people should be a member of the Republican Party until the support equal rights

 

Funnily enough these policies are considered centre or even centre-right in some parts of Australia and Europe. Policies that are often taken as a given set of human rights and desirable diplomatic obligations.

The Republicans are steadily digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole. Nationally, their support base is dwindling; their traditional white conservatives are increasingly becoming an obvious minority, and their corporate backers are being seen as buying them in more and more often. As a response to their unpopularity, they've done exactly the wrong thing; getting even more extreme in their policies, rather than softening to get some of the Democratic votes, who are hardly much different in a lot of their policies. Their anti-abortion and anti-immigration laws basically make to anyone who isn't a white male that the Republicans don't care about them. Their increasingly harsh campaign against improving poverty is alienating people who were already against them. Young people are generally rather hostile to the Republicans, and their policies are so skewed to business owners that they're even upsetting upper-middle class people.

The Republicans have a massive campaign machine and use state resources in a way that seems to blur the lines between country and party (not that the Democrats are much better.) They either have to become so reactionary that they essentially become a corporatist dictatorship, or they have to reform and become centre-right like the Democrats. They've got little choice if they want to stay relevant throughout this century.

 

I disagree with pretty much all of those policies, but there's no arguing the bolded part.

As for what a previous poster said about Bush, he was definitely quite liberal/idealistic in his foreign policy. He was no doubt more idealistic than Obama in that regard.

---------- Post added 16th Jan 2014 at 01:00 AM ----------

Depends who the Republican presidential nominee will be.

In terms of Congress, Republicans are in good shape in the House and could possibly win back the Senate. Additionally, the majority of governors in America are Republican. The Republican Party as a whole obviously has some problems, but it isn't in terrible shape, either.

 

I honestly think by 2014, independents will see how republicans are obstructing everything and anything the president and the democrats want to do, and refuse to compromise unless they get a 80-20 cut. There were 5,000,000 more votes for democrats than republicans in 2012, but because of gerrymandering, the Republicans kept the house, but lost big in their effort to retake the senate. (I.E. McCaskill beating Akin, among other races republicans said they had in the bag in August.) I think the democrats gain one seat in the senate and retake the house.

But anyways, I do think that the leadership often caves in to the ultraconservative tea partiers way too often, and in a bunch of cases are very tolerant of bigotry. Until the republicans decide to shift into the moderate mindset, they will continue to lose more and more elections, as millennials and minorities continue to vote for democrats in wide margins, along with women.

 

Democrats will not be winning back the House. Guaranteed. There are a ton of safe Republican seats. There's so few "tossup seats" that it really doesn't matter how independents vote. Last I checked, the Washington Post had the chances of Democrats winning back the House in single digits. The ACA is going to be a big problem for Democrats politically if it remains unpopular, and Obama's shitty approval ratings will also bring Democrats down (if he remains unpopular).

Right now, I think Democrats maintain control of the Senate, but it's definitely not as certain as Republicans keeping control of the House.

 

In my opinion, the Republican party could be conservative and still attract the American public even LGBT people. That is, if their party concentrated on being fiscally conservative which I believe a lot of Americans could get on board with, myself included. That being said, when your party becomes inextricably linked with social policies that march closer and closer to neo-fascism *cue south park voice* you're gonna have a bad time.

---------- Post added 16th Jan 2014 at 09:26 AM ----------

Also, I think it's definitely ironic LaSalvia formed GOProud because Log Cabin Republicans were not "conservative enough". I'm aware he doesn't mean socially(at least not to the extent of the Tea Party) but c'mon. Is it not logical to think "hmm..I'm a gay Republican but I think Log Cabin is too moderate. I'm going to create another group were we can be more radically conservative. Let me just look up some radical conservatives in my party to see who'd be on board....oh.......um...well, &#@!

 

Yeah the Democrats won't be winning back the House...because Republicans gerrymandered the shit out of the country after everyone but old white people stayed home for the 2010 midterm elections...not because Republicans are the majority party in America, far from it.

In 2012, Republicans nationwide won 242 seats to the Democrats' 193...despite the Democrats receiving over 1.4 million more votes than Republicans in House races nationwide.

All the Republicans have succeeded in doing is remaking "The People's House" into the most undemocratic body in the U.S. government.

The fact that we allow partisan redistricting schemes that last for 10 freaking years is another fundamental flaw to the American political system. But whatever, 2020 will be a presidential election year, after that this little Republican life support scheme will come crashing down. That's assuming that the demographic changes that have already made the Democrats into the clear majority party don't overwhelm the GOP by then, even with its gerrymandering. There's only so much gerrymandering you can do when your base is literally dying off by the day while you're alienating more and more living potential voters by the day. Even a lifelong willing whipping boy of the GOP like Jimmy LaSalvia is now joining the rolls of the millions of people alienated by the Party of Bigotry.

 

And Democrats would have done the same thing. Let's not pretend otherwise.

2020 is still a long way off; a lot can change in a party in six years, and 2016 will determine where the Republican Party is headed.