GOProud Booted from Conservative Confab

Gay conservative group GOProud has been informed that it will not be invited to attend the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an event the organization had co-sponsored in 2010 and 2011, according to a July 29 posting at fringe religious right website WorldNetDaily.

GOProud describes itself as an organization dedicated to upholding traditional conservative values such as limited government, personal responsibility, and individual liberty. As such, GOProud is fiscally conservative.

But the group has raised hackles in the GLBT community because of its support for anti-gay politicians such as Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. Cain told an ABC News interviewer that being gay is a "sin" and a "choice."

Bachmann has said that gays lead "very sad" lives that are "of Satan." Her husband, Marcus Bachmann, runs two Christian counseling centers where, an ABC News segment suggested, so-called "reparative therapy" is offered in a bid to help gays "convert" to heterosexuality -- a treatment that mental health professionals warn is ineffectual and liable to do far more damage than good.

Both Cain and Bachmann have said that states should have the right to determine whether gay and lesbian families should be allowed to enter into marriage. Bachmann has also apparently contradicted herself in saying that she would support an amendment to the Constitution to put marriage equality out of reach for same-sex couples across the nation.

But GOProud has also raised hackles among the GOP's fringe right base by seeking to reconcile support for full legal and social parity for gays with the tenets of conservatism. Social conservatives do not, by and large, support marriage equality for same-sex couples, and have voiced objections on issues important to the GLBT community ranging from the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to hate crimes and workplace protections covering sexual minorities, to anti-bullying legislation.

The WND article suggested that the group, which had co-sponsored CPAC for the last two years, was shunned because a number of anti-gay extremist groups had refused to participate in the 2011 CPAC due to the presence of GOProud. Among the groups cited by WND were the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and the Heritage Foundation.

The National Review Online reported earlier this year that at least two anti-gay conservative groups -- the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation -- weren't going to be in attendance at the 2011 CPAC anyway. Nonetheless, reports from the fringe right insisted that "important" organizations and political figures were shunning the event due to GOProud's participation, and implied that those organizations had stayed away due to a gay presence.

The American Conservative Union (ACU) organizes CPAC annually. The head of the ACU wrote to GOProud leader Jimmy LaSalvia to say, "As a courtesy to your organization, a previous co-sponsor of CPAC, this letter serves to inform you GOProud will not be invited to participate in a formal role for CPAC events scheduled during the 2012 election cycle," but added, "As always, GOProud members are welcome and encouraged to attend as individual registrants."

GOProud issued a response to the letter on July 30. The text of the statement was posted the same day to the GOProud website.

The group's Board of Directors wrote, "We are deeply disappointed at the decision of the American Conservative Union to bar GOProud from participating in CPAC. They are well within their right to do so, but a decision like this will have consequences.

"For the last two years, GOProud has sought to support CPAC and keep the conservative movement united," the GOProud statement continued. "Unfortunately, elements inside and outside of ACU have pushed their own narrow, divisive and sometimes personal agenda. They have done so at the expense of the conservative movement.

"What is truly sad is that this troubling development takes place at a time when we should be united and focused on defeating Barack Obama," the statement continued.

"GOProud has been and will continue to be an outspoken proponent of conservative values and conservative policy," added the group's response. "This organization will continue to work to bring conservatives of all stripes together to save this country and defeat the left. Obviously, that work will no longer be done at CPAC, but it will be done."

On the far-right fringe, however, another organization was similarly dropped: WND noted in passing that the John Birch Society was informed that it would not be invited to the 2012 edition of CPAC. The John Birch Society co-sponsored CPAC in 2010, to the horror of moderate Republicans who feared what would happen later that year in the midterm elections as a result. In the event, Republicans swept at the polls.

But intense criticism of GOProud's co-sponsorship in 2010 and 2011 from anti-gay fringe elements, and an internal shakeup at the ACU, pointed the way early on for GOProud's rejection at the 2012 event. Anti-gay groups also lambasted CPAC's primary sponsor, the board of the ACU, for alleged financial irregularities. The departure of the group's previous leader, David Keene, and replacement by Al Cardenas was similarly spun by anti-gay site WorldNetDaily in a Feb. 14 article as evidence of the anti-gay elements' clout.

WND reported that Cardenas had assured conservatives that the participants in next year's CPAC would be subjected to a "comprehensive vetting process" -- words that, together with the supposedly leaked news that no gays will be allowed in 2012, formed the basis of the site's Feb. 14 article.

The site also touted words spoken by GOProud founder Chris Barron, who told MetroWeekly that Cleta Mitchell, of the ACU Foundation, was a "nasty bigot."

GOProud: Impolitic, or Just Gay?

Barron issued an apology for the remark, saying that attacks on his person and his organization had pushed him to the point of lashing out. "For the past six months, we have watched as unfair and untrue attacks have been leveled against our organization, our allies, our friends and sometimes even their families," Barron said. "Everyone has their breaking point and clearly in my interview with Metro Weekly I had reached mine. I shouldn't have used the language that I did to describe Cleta Mitchell and for that I apologize."

Indeed, Mitchell was not the only target of Barron's vitriol; the GOProud founder had also reportedly tweeted an angry comment about the gay left, deriding them as "the American Taliban. Hateful, angry and dumb as shit." But his comment about Mitchell displeased fellow gay conservatives. "I have long believed it best to address your friends' faults in private and your enemies' in public," wrote B. Daniel Blatt at the blog GayPatriot on Feb. 11. However, added Blatt, Barron had "crossed a line" and should "use greater discretion in future commentary."

Conservatives were quick to take Barron to task. The American Spectator labeled Barron's words a "partial apology," noting that he had not issued a similar mea culpa for calling Tony Perkins of the anti-gay Family Research Council a "bigot," or for saying that right-wing political figures like Sen. Jim DeMint -- who himself caused an uproar with anti-gay comments last year -- were stranded on an "island of misfit toys."

"He needs to understand that objections to his group's participation stems from their policy positions and the way they have pushed them--what they believe and how they act politically, not who they are in private," the American Spectator article said. "Going beyond pushing a state recognition of certain contractual rights for homosexuals, all the way to demanding state-approved homosexual marriage, is so obviously a fundamental change in conservatism as to clearly be a cause for serious misgivings. Of course there would be a protest from conservative groups."

But if some conservatives saw GOProud's leadership as needlessly abrasive, others seemed to take exception to the group based solely on the fact that it was organized around the needs of conservative gay Americans. As part of its message that government needs to be smaller and less intrusive on personal liberties, GOProud supports marriage equality for gay and lesbian families, a stance that many anti-gay fringe right groups abhor, claiming that marriage by sexual minorities will somehow "tarnish" and "weaken" the institution of marriage.

The protest that answered GOProud's stance on marriage equality was summed up in a letter send to Keene prior to the 2011 CPAC. Liberty University's Mathew Staver and a number of other anti-gay leaders, including American Values head Gary Bauer, NOM's Brian Brown, and American Principles Project leader Frank Cannon, sent the letter, in which they set out their putative complaint with GOProud's co-sponsorship.

"The issue is not that GOProud works on only four of the five traditional items on the conservative agenda," the letter read; "rather, it omits--because it actively opposes--one part of the core."

Added the letter, "It is no more acceptable as a participant at CPAC than a group that said it embraced the 'traditional conservative agenda' but actively worked for higher taxes and greater governmental control of the economy."

The "core" value that the letter's signatories accuse GOProud of standing against is that of "life and family," in the words of Princeton's Robert P. George, who established the American Principles Project. Anti-gay groups--especially religiously motivated ones--promote themselves as the sole genuine defenders of marriage, family, and children, calling sexual minorities the agents of a "culture of death"--that is, a culture in which sexual congress fails to lead to procreation, and sexual promiscuity spreads disease.

The fact that gays and lesbians often enjoy stable, long term relationships, often have children of their own, and have long sought the same legal rights, protections, and obligations of legal marriage that heterosexuals take for granted is often not acknowledged by such anti-gay groups. The assumption that gay and lesbian families are somehow inferior to heterosexual families undergirds the assumption that gays cannot authentically support all of the "core values"--small government, fiscal accountability, a strong national defense, a leadership role in global affairs, and devotion to family--which heterosexual conservatives say they promote.

WND noted that Cardenas had told a blogger that the group would look more carefully at the objectives and viewpoints promoted by participants in 2012 and screen out those whose objectives did not align with the conservative movement.

But GOProud has contended that specific positions on issues are secondary to the fact that their organization is out, proud, and conservative. In short, the group suggested, anti-gay elements of the political right simply do not like sexual minorities: said GOProud head Jimmy LaSalvia, "The reason the boycotters applied a litmus test to us is because we were born gay."

That interpretation can hardly be faulted given statements like the one tossed off by Staver, who told the New York Times in January that "GOProud is working to undermine one of our core values" by holding to a view that marriage equality should be a matter for states, rather than the federal government, to decide -- a philosophy shared by many other conservative groups.

But Staver implied that although gays are welcome to lend their weight to the conservative movement, they should content themselves with a seat in the back of the bus and not press for the perquisites of full membership in the conservative movement, such as leadership roles: "[T]hey shouldn't be allowed to be co-sponsors" of CPAC, Staver said.

Gay Conservatives Ascendant?

The idea of a gay conservative is still often seen as a contradiction in terms, but in the last year the notion has lost some of its novelty. It was a conservative gay group -- the Log Cabin Republicans -- that won a judgment against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" last year, generating headlines, giving fresh credence to the idea of gay conservatives as a force to recognize and take seriously, and possibly helping to drive the anti-gay law's eventual repeal.

But not all is well among conservatives when it comes to the issue of GLBT Americans. For some groups on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum -- especially the religiously motivated -- gays are nothing more than "sinners" who "choose" to be romantically and sexually attracted to members of their own gender.

Gays are excoriated as "promiscuous" by anti-gay conservatives, but the idea of domestically settled, married gays is even more upsetting: It was only a few years ago that record-setting sums of money poured into California in support of Proposition 8, an effort -- barely successful and now under challenge in the courts -- to strip gay and lesbian families of their then-existing right to wed. Since then, at least one major player in the Proposition 8 battle, the National Organization for Marriage, has spent more millions on a nationwide campaign to prevent -- or roll back -- marriage equality for gay and lesbian families, going so far as to vow to spend more millions to defeat Republicans in New York who voted for that state's recent marriage equality law.

Other conservatives have little difficulty accepting gays into the ranks. Conservatives of this stripe and gays angry at how they have been targeted by intrusive anti-gay laws have a common cause in wishing for a smaller, less invasive government. Moreover, such conservatives tend to emphasize fiscal conservatism, looking for smaller government to be more frugal as well as less liable to control the details of their personal lives.

One of GOProud's main objectives has been to offer a home to sexual minorities who embrace a conservative political ideology. But many GLBTs still look askance at supporting the GOP, which all too often has played to the anti-gay elements among its base and thrown gay equality under the bus in the name of credibility among anti-gay conservative elements.

But if GOProud's road to acceptance by elements of the gay community has been tough, the status of the anti-gay right within conservative circles appears even shakier. Just prior to the commencement of CPC '11 on Feb. 10, a New York Magazine article noted that the putative "boycott" by fringe right groups in 2011 was "an effort to strip the newish homosexual element from the conservative coalition and part of a larger bid to forcibly remarry social and fiscal conservatives.

"The bet was that distaste for gay people themselves -- as opposed to lightning rods like gay marriage or adoption, which aren't included in GOProud's platform -- is still a strong right-wing motivator," the article continued. "It's a bet they seem to have lost."

The article pointed out that the event did not lose a host of heavy-hitting conservatives due to GOProud's presence. Rather, major right-wing figures showed up in force, including Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Tim Pawlenty. DeMint's absence is cited as evidence of the anti-gay right's influence -- but DeMint was one of only a few, if not the sole, conservative politician of national status not to attend due to gays having a place at the helm.

But efforts to reclaim some sort of cultural and political viability on the backs of gays may be understandable, the article suggested, given how useful anti-gay messages were to conservatives in years past. The only drawback is that the culture has shifted -- including conservatives: "The tea party is now the most electorally potent portion of the GOP base," the article noted.

"At the same time, only 50 percent of tea partiers self-identify as socially conservative. That has to worry anti-gay groups, who suffered significant losses in 2010, culminating in the bi-partisan repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell.' "

Moreover, there's reason to believe that the shift is generational and not liable to being rolled back. A majority of younger Americans are supportive of full legal equality for their gay and lesbian fellow Americans, in stark contrast to the views of older conservatives.

The 2012 edition of CPAC is scheduled for Feb. 9-11 in Washington, D.C.