Fight, fight, fight!
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist and Republican strategist who famously said he wants to make government so small you can drown it in a bathtub (the way it happened in New Orleans, I guess), doesn’t really care much for the anti-gay part of the Republican agenda, and showed it by joining the board of GOProud, the group of gay conservatives who split off because the Log Cabin Republicans weren’t wingnutty enough.
Predictably, the usual suspects on the Religious Right are losing it over this, as it’s just more evidence that, as usual, the Religious Right is the bastard stepchild of the conservative movement. Kyle at Right Wing Watch has collected reactions from a couple of rightwing Christian organizations. Go there to read the response from Focus on the Family, after you read this reaction from the Family Research Council:
I was somewhat surprised to see that Americans for Tax Reform’s president, Grover Norquist, has decided to join the Advisory Council of the homosexual group GOProud. Grover is usually a masterful Republican strategist and coalition builder — but in this case, he seems prepared to compromise a unified conservative movement in order to appease a tiny minority of the overall population. GOProud is not a conservative organization that happens to be gay. It’s a homosexual organization that’s marginally conservative. GOProud’s own website explains just how radical its priorities are. This is a group that opposes the death tax and ObamaCare — not because they aren’t sound economic policies — but because they “discriminate” against “gay families.”
Interjecting: The Family Research Council is pissed off that GOProud supports the same exact stupid, disproven ideas they support, but does so because (they think) it will help gays. This is how much Peter Sprigg and Tony Perkins hate gay people, that they’ll try to kill off support for their own ideas if a case can be made that they’re good for (wealthy, white male) gays.
And the platform doesn’t end there. One of the group’s top 10 “principles” is to create “enterprise zones” for homosexuals, despite the fact that the average income for gays and lesbians is higher than most everyone else. At least two other of its “principles” call for the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act. Among their other priorities: allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military and defeating any attempt to protect one-man, one-woman marriage. They even ran ads criticizing President Obama for not doing enough for the homosexual community!
Grover is famous for saying he’ll work with anyone who agrees with him “80 percent of the time.” But it’s been the social issues that he seems willing to sacrifice. His belief that we can have fiscal stability without moral decency is doomed to failure and only drives a deep wedge in a movement that was unified to bring change to Washington this fall.
Poor FRC. It’s like Grover defriended them on Facebook, twice.
