Log Cabin Republicans Are Wary of GOP's Future

This op-ed by Deb Price in the Detroit News (http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071231/OPINION03/712310351/1272/OPINION0310) looks at issues that the Log Cabin Republicans should have been focusing on years ago. There are many of us who were once Republicans before the party became an extension of the Christian Right wingnut organizations. I can only wonder what took these folks to wake up to reality. When you are dealing with the Christianists, "working from within" is not a serious option since you are dealing with irrational people motivated by fanatic religious beliefs. Reason and logic get you nowhere. Hence why I have been saying for some time that the only cure for the GOP is to allow it to crash and burn so that hopefully in the rebuilding process the nutcases will be driven from the party. Currently, it is only the non-nutcases leaving the GOP. Here are highlights from Deb's column:

For more than three decades, Brian Bennett threw himself into Republican politics, including serving as a delegate to five national conventions. The pro-life, fiscal conservative was also part of the "Austin 12," a group of 11 gay men and one lesbian who, in an historic meeting in 2000, shared about the joys and difficulties of being gay in a session with George W. Bush, then the presumptive Republican nominee. But when Bush made a sharp turn away from earlier gay-supportive words and deeds, most notably by pushing for an anti-gay constitutional amendment, Bennett got fed up and cut back on his time and money commitments to the GOP.

Bennett is among the 25 percent of gay Americans who vote Republican. I caught up with several Austin 12-ers as well as other gay Republicans just before the kickoff to the caucuses and primaries that will select the GOP presidential nominee. I heard a lot of pain, frustration and dwindling patience. Most, like Bennett, said they are backing Rudy Giuliani. As mayor of New York, he pushed for and signed a sweeping domestic partnership law in 1998.

Gay Republicans view the next few weeks as directing their party down one of two fateful roads. As one predicted off the record, picking Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, who are intensely wooing religious conservatives, would be "the Thelma and Louise moment" that would send the Republican Party off a cliff. Or as Jim McFarland, an Austin 12-er who is vice president of the gay Log Cabin's Wisconsin chapter and a Giuliani backer, puts it, "The future of the Republican Party depends on who the nominee is. We could see the demise of the Republican Party. If it continues down the road of focusing on motivating fundamentalist Christian voters, that will fail."