Originally published in 1999.
As Rich Tafel tells it, being a gay Republican isn't easy. Tafel is the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, the national federation of gays and lesbians who lobby to make the Grand Old Party more gay-supportive, and to make gays and lesbians more open to a political vision that departs from the big-government ethos of the lesbigay left by advocating less government interference in our bedrooms and our boardrooms.
This counter-agenda calls for lower taxes, an expectation of personal responsibility, and support for that dynamic prosperity generator known as the market economy, unfettered by an overload of often irrational (and politically motivated) regulatory and redistributive mandates. It also calls for equal rights under the law for gays and lesbians, and for all Americans, while eschewing group entitlements.
But Tafel's just-published political memoir, "Party Crasher: A Gay Republican Challenges Politics as Usual," shows what strong opposition gay GOPers face, and not just from the religious right's supplicants in their party. Some of the most intense hostility gay Republicans confront comes from the left-leaning activists who dominate the "official" lesbigay political movement, who effortlessly seem to disregard their otherwise ubiquitous "diversity" mantra whenever the topic turns to inclusion of gay Republicans as a hue in the gay rainbow.
Tafel himself pulls no punches when it comes to what he terms "the knee-jerk, politically correct establishment that dominates gay thinking." Back during the '80s, as a young politico in Massachusetts, he was stunned when the local gay political leadership (including Congressman Barney Frank) chose to support a profoundly anti-gay Democratic nominee for governor, John Silber, against the extraordinarily pro-gay Republican nominee and subsequent victor, William Weld. Tafel notes with pleasure that he saw, not for the last time, "a tide of gay and lesbian voters swing hard against the entire gay political establishment and vote to put a Republican in the state house." In fact, according to exit poll figures, some 33 percent of self-identified gay/lesbian/bisexual voters across the nation routinely pull the Republican lever in congressional elections -- numbers just as routinely ignored by both the leadership of the GOP and the national gay establishment.
"The gay movement's one-party political strategy of simply working within the Democratic Party has clearly failed," Tafel argues. In recent presidential elections, "We were taken for granted by Democrats and written off by Republicans." Bill Clinton was endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lesbian and gay political action fund, before the first GOP primary in New Hampshire -- and despite the fact that Clinton not only supported the Defense of Marriage Act -- which Tafel correctly labels the most anti-gay measure ever passed by Congress -- but bragged about signing it, in ads that ran on Christian radio stations.
Contrary to what he terms liberal gay "assimilationists" exemplified by the Human Rights Campaign, and radical gay "liberationists" exemplified by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force -- the two wings of today's "movement" -- he calls for recognition of a third alternative, namely gay and lesbian "libertarians," exemplified by the overlooked one-third to one-quarter of all gay voters who side with the GOP. "Histories of the gay movement divide it into two categories -- liberationist and assimilationist -- with no mention of the libertarians," he writes. "Gay libertarians stress their individualism, so they don't accept the labels of identity politics."
When the emphasis is placed back on individual rights rather than group entitlements, a different sort of gay agenda begins to emerge. As gay libertarian Andrew Sullivan contends in his book "Virtually Normal," the gay community should shift its focus from seeking government protection to removing government-imposed barriers to equal treatment. As Tafel himself notes, Sullivan argues for a new movement strategy: equal marriage rights for gays, lifting the ban on gays in the military, and the repeal of sodomy laws and other government prohibitions that treat gays and lesbians second-class citizens. And that's all. This is farther than Tafel himself is willing to go -- he supports government enforced anti-discrimination provisions, for example. But Tafel notes that while the gay activist leadership is slow to change, "the movement away from group identity politics toward a respect for individuals in all their complexity is growing."
This is the politics that rejects speech codes but favors vigorous debate; that rejects gender and race-based preferential treatment, but favors equal opportunity for individuals based on personal merit; that opposes a welfare state that seeks to redistribute income through taxation, but favors economic policies that foster a growing free market that increases everyone's prosperity.
But let me stop here, lest you think Tafel's book is mostly a snipe at gay liberals and their leftover-left nostrums. In fact, the book's main strength is in Tafel's support of libertarian values and his advocacy for a renewed GOP that remembers why personal liberty was the Republic's (and the Republican Party's) founding principle. It's a message that both the anti-gay leaders of the GOP and the left-liberal leaders of the lesbigay establishment both need to hear.