How can you be gay and a Republican?


That's a question that's been nagging me for a long time, ever since I heard gay Republicans were forming the Log Cabin Republican Club. (The name is supposed to suggest that the anti-slavery "party of Lincoln" has a tradition of fighting discrimination.)

There are 52 chapters in 30 states now, and plenty of fights with the GOP: over the party's opposition to same-sex marriage, for example; Log Cabin's attempts to keep homophobes off the podium at the national convention in August; and, in court, the Texas Republican Party's decision in May to bar Log Cabin members from the state convention. (The Log Cabiners did win their suit and got a booth at the convention.)



And still I wonder: How can you be gay and in the same party with these guys:

PAT BUCHANAN:

He called Democrats "crossdressers" (Dems = homos = transvestites?) at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, and said "Clinton and Clinton" would "promote the homosexual rights agenda." Running for president again this past February, he announced three separate times that he wouldn't appoint gay men or lesbians to his cabinet.





BOB DORNAN:

He once said "gay" stands for "Got AIDS yet?" The California Representative and onetime presidential candidate also wrote the controversial rule excluding HIV-positive personnel from the military that went into law in February--and was repealed in April. "The homosexual lobby is what drives the Senate...," he said the day of the repeal.




GEORGE BUSH:

In 1990, the President was asked how he'd react to having a gay grandchild, and he said, "I would hope he wouldn't go out and try to convince people that this was the normal lifestyle, that this was an appropriate lifestyle." At the party convention two years later, where he was the Republican nominee, Bush surprised some of his supporters with his silence on both Buchanan's rhetoric and his party's plank against "preferential status under civil rights statutes" for gays and lesbians.





BOB DOLE:


Log Cabin's contribution to the Dole-for-President campaign got sent back last year--Dole didn't "agree" with the group's "agenda." And this spring he cosponsored the Senate's Defense of Marriage Act, which would let states refuse to recognize same-sex marriages.