My colleague Jeff Charles wrote a great piece on Tuesday that asked a simple question.
Jeff isn’t wrong and I have to agree with his conclusion. I’ve reached this same conclusion and loyal readers will see I tend to put the LGBT community into two different groups. There’s the community proper which is comprised of a myriad of different kinds of people with ideas that differ from one person to the next, just like any community out there. Then there’s the LGBT activist community, which trends radical and tends to have a socio-political goal of supremacy rather than equality.
(READ: I Support LGBT Individuals, but Not Its Community of Activists)
To Jeff’s point, there are many, many members of the LGBT community that are just as disgusted and fed up with LGBT activism as you are. Moreover, many of these individuals believe in a range of conservative principles such as limited government, lower taxes, stronger borders, the rule of law, and gun rights. They are, for all intents and purposes, conservative in various areas and you have more in common with them than you think.
Republicans making these individuals who need a political home feel like outcasts aren’t the play. It’s the adoption of an unnecessary weakness and reinforcement to the politically homeless that everything the left has said about Republicans and conservatives is true; we’re exclusionary to a fault.
The Republican Party can’t afford this narrative to thrive. No, scratch that. This country can’t afford that narrative to thrive.
Republicans and conservativism should be putting themselves on display as the party that respects the individual, the worker, the child, the soldier, and the average American. They should display how various people are coming together to fight the left and its radicalism.
This doesn’t mean that we’re going to throw ourselves into the cultures of those we disagree with in their private lives, rather we’re going to all agree on something far better; we’re going to leave each other alone while we fight those who look to dominate us.
Think of the Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, that found themselves in direct confrontation with the radical left over attempting to indoctrinate their children with transgenderism. Think of the Armenians in Glendale, California, who were brought to physical confrontation with radical leftists over the same thing.
It would look mighty inconvenient for the radical left to see conservatives, a group often blamed for being Islamophobic, to have Muslims seen within their big tent. The same could be said about LGBT members who have no desire to be represented by the radicals on the left that claim to speak for them.
The Republican Party needs to start looking at who its allies are and welcoming them in. As an individualist party, we can recognize that each of us might live in a lifestyle the other wants no part of but that the principle we can all unite behind is that each of our lives is none of the business of the other.
The other thing we can all agree on is that we want a stable economy, strong borders, crime-free streets, and lower taxes. If a person can’t agree on all of them, they likely agree with at least one or two of them. Currently, the Democrats aren’t offering any of these.
The left has made a lot of enemies, and especially of people they claim to represent. It’s time to make it clear that the big tent is ready to accept the disaffected and help them understand that the enemy of their enemy might not necessarily be their friend, but he is their ally and best hope for a better future.