Conservatives’ Friendly Gestures Toward Gays Infuriate Far Right
Conservative columnist and author Ann Coulter’s decision to be the featured speaker next month at a “Homocon” gathering of homosexual conservatives has gotten her axed as a keynote speaker at a meeting of prominent far-right personalities. Joseph Farah’s decision to cut Coulter from his Taking America Back National Conference in Miami next month is only the latest pushback by some on the far right who are incensed and worried by recent gains made by the gay rights movement.
The organization GOProud announced last week that Coulter had accepted an offer to speak at its first annual Homocon party in New York City on Sept. 25 despite her lengthy history of slurring gays. GOProud is a political organization of conservative gay Republicans.
Farah — the founder of the right-wing WorldNetDaily (WND) website that is organizing the Miami conference — dropped Coulter from the program because of her upcoming speech to the gay Republicans. Coulter had been scheduled to give a talk entitled “The Invasion of the Godless Barbarians” on Sept. 17 at the WND conference. Other speakers on tap at that event include such far right stalwarts as U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, conservative activist and frequent political candidate Alan Keyes and conspiracy-minded author Jerome Corsi. Right after the conference, WND has a second scheduled event featuring far-right conservative speakers — this time during a weeklong Caribbean cruise at the peak of hurricane season.
“Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about ‘taking America back’ when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very ‘unconservative’ agenda represented by GOProud,” Farah said in a WND story headlined “WND dumps Ann Coulter from Miami due to Homoconflict.” “The drift of the conservative movement to a brand of materialistic libertarianism is one of the main reasons we planned this conference from the beginning.”
The WND story quotes Farah asking Coulter, “Do you not understand you are legitimizing a group that is fighting for same-sex marriage and open homosexuality in the military — not to mention the idea that sodomy is just an alternate lifestyle?” Coulter’s response, according to the story, is that she often speaks to groups she doesn’t endorse. “I’m sure I agree with GOProud more than I do with at least half of my college audiences,” Coulter is quoted as saying. “But in any event, giving a speech is not an endorsement of every position held by the people I’m speaking to. I was going to speak for you guys, I think you’re nuts on the birther thing (though I like you otherwise!).” (WND has published dozens upon dozens of stories suggesting that President Obama was not born in the United States — a contention that has been dismissed by all but the most conspiracy-obsessed on the far right.)
Coulter’s response didn’t mollify Farah, who complained that GOProud “is about infiltration of the conservative movement and dividing it from within with twisted and dangerous ideas way out of the mainstream of American opinion.” He added that GOProud “is exploiting its coup in getting Ann Coulter to speak” at its event. Even so, Coulter will remain a weekly columnist for WND, Farah said, because columnists are held to a different standard than speakers.
Farah isn’t the only conservative in a tizzy over recent developments concerning homosexuals. Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid wrote a few days ago of his chagrin that Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn and Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions will attend a national fundraising dinner next month sponsored by the Log Cabin Republicans, another gay and lesbian activist organization. Cornyn and Sessions, Kincaid noted, are in charge of helping Republican candidates for the Senate and House get elected. The headline on his column: “Is the GOP Becoming the Gay Old Party?”
In the same column, Kincaid lamented that new Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan “has a militant pro-homosexual orientation in such matters as opposition to military recruiters on campus because of the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy.” Nor was he pleased with the “tyrannical ruling” by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker overturning California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. “As was the case of Kagan, there are reports that Walker is a secret homosexual,” Kincaid added.
So it’s no surprise that Kincaid also was unhappy that Coulter agreed to speak at the Homocon event. Perhaps implying something about Coulter’s sexual orientation, he took care to point out that Coulter is 49 years old and unmarried.
Meanwhile, Laurie Higgins, an official at the vituperatively anti-gay Illinois Family Institute, bemoaned the fact that Illinois Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kirk is an “alleged homosexual” and that Glenn Beck “has proclaimed that legalized homosexual marriage wouldn’t harm America.”
It’s all too much for Higgins. “True conservatives need to rethink their cowardly refusal to address the inherent immorality of homosexual practice and their deeply flawed strategy of calling for a moratorium on ‘social issues,’” she wrote. “Once homosexuality-affirming policies are enacted, they will become nigh unto impossible to reverse.”
What Higgins longs for is a return to the days when gays were widely condemned. “There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice and all other immoral behaviors,” she wrote. “When men and women were ashamed of homosexuality and cross-dressing (along with fornication and cavalier divorce), there was less of it.” More important, Higgins added, “when homosexuals were ‘in the closet,’ (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and ‘transsexuals’), they weren’t acquiring and raising children.”
