When people challenge rights for the gay and lesbian community, they always say that we shouldn’t get “special rights” as though we’re requesting something out of the ordinary instead of the right to marry, or hold a job, or be given equal opportunities for housing, health care, and other mundane rights that our heterosexual counterparts so often take for granted.
Our community often strives to show the world just how ordinary we are—how we are just “the same” as everyone else. Well, this last round of elections showed, unfortunately, that our community is just as apt to vote against its own self-interest as any other.
Exit polls revealed that 31 percent of gay voters cast their ballots for Republicans in the midterm election. That’s up 4 percent from the 2008 general election.
Gay Republicans like Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director of GOProud, are excited about the news and see it as a growing trend:
”This should be a wake-up call for the out-of-touch so-called leadership of Gay, Inc. in Washington, D.C., which has become little more than a subsidiary of the Democrat Party.”
Actually, it should be a wake-up call to the LGBT community that we need to become better informed about the issues facing us and how voting Republican can affect that. With the House going majority Republican, it will now be harder, if not impossible, to get issues like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repealed, or the Employment Non-Discrimination Act passed, and never mind getting the Defense of Marriage Act repealed in the upcoming Congress.
Ah, but midterms often make for strange bedfellows. Gays combined with their usual nemesis—white evangelical Christians—to give the House back to the Republicans. When you hear gay people who voted for the Republicans tell it in their own words, their reasoning is strikingly similar to the memes uttered by those same white, evangelical Christians.
Republican voting gays made their case this past week on Michelangelo Signorile’s XM radio show.
Jim, in Lexington, Kentucky told Signorile that he voted a straight Republican ticket to “send a message” to the Democrats for not doing enough to advance LGBT rights.
“I want to see the Democrats take a big beating like the Republicans did,” Jim said. “so maybe in the future they’ll wake up and start doing what they promised.”
“But do you think that Rand Paul is going to do something for gay rights and that Republicans are?” asked Signorile about the man’s support for the Tea Party-backed U.S. Senate winner.
Of course Jim doesn’t think Paul will help the LGBT community, but said his vote was simply a message to Obama and the Democrats.
Marvin, also from Lexington, Kentucky, complained that gays and lesbians can’t be one-issue voters, always concerned about their sexual orientation and nothing else.
“That’s not my only issue in life,” said Marvin. “Yes, they may not be pro-gay but they may want to work for something else I believe in.” Signorile would have none of it.
You want to believe, Marvin, that you have the luxury not to put being gay first, but you don’t. You are a member of a minority group that is hated in this society and there is no getting around that. You in KY have no civil rights for gay people at all. You are treated like garbage and like dirt and you voted for a man who believes in treating you like garbage and dirt because you feel there are other issues you want to put ahead of that, but I’m sorry, you were made gay. [ … ] You voted for somebody who is voting against your civil rights and you are claiming you have something else in common with that person but that person believes you shouldn’t have civil rights.
Probably the saddest example of a gay person voting against their own interests though came from a caller named Ralph in Portland, Maine. Ralph’s main concern was over rampant government spending, and he blames the Democrats for having an “open checkbook.”
Slate’s James Ledbetter, speaking to that pervasive claim, shows why everyone in the voting public needs an education, not just gays tempted to vote Republican:
If you really think that the problem with the economy and/or the federal budget is as simple as too much government spending, then you have to point your finger squarely at the national Republican Party. Of the six recent Congresses essentially controlled by the GOP, from 1995 to 2006, not one ever reduced federal outlays. (The last year in which federal outlays were lower than the year before was 1965, when Democrats ran both the White House and Congress.) As soon as Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House in 2001, spending really took off, with more than $100 billion added to federal outlays every year that Bush sat in the White House (considerably more than either Bill Clinton or Bush 41).
Spending is what Republicans do best, and you can expect them to continue it, and not on social programs that might help people.
Signorile is understandably flabbergasted by this line of thinking, asking Ralph if he’d take “money over your civil rights?”
“Yes,” Ralph replied.
“How greedy are you, Ralph? Money over your civil rights?” Signorile said. It seems Ralph and those gays and lesbians who “sent a message” to Obama with their votes in this past election are feeling at home on the plantation. Ralph went on to justify his support of Republicans, including a vote for the new governor—Tea Party-backed Paul LePage—by saying: “I live a happy life, yes, I can’t marry my partner. We are adopting a child together. We can live our life. I am happy. It would be great if we could get married, but …”
At this point Signorile interrupted him to say, “Do you know that the Senator that was elected in New Hampshire wants to take away the right of gay people to adopt? Do you want me to bet you the governor you voted for in Maine would support taking away that right? How can you vote for people who would take away your rights?”
That’s a weighty question for any gay or lesbian person who voted for Republicans in this past election. As Ralph said, “It would be great if we could get married, but…”
And in that “but,” Ralph has revealed that gay and lesbian voters, like their white, evangelical Christian bedfellows in this past election, are mere humans like everyone else. We are susceptible to the same misleading campaign slogans, we have short-term political memories and don’t know who is really to blame for what, and when we get in the voting booth all we really care about is who we think will get us a job, and make us feel more secure.
Equality after all.
