Gays - Exluded From the GOP's "Inclusion"

With roughly 2% of the attendees being non-white, the GOP convention organizers went to great lengths to give the faux appearance that today's GOP is inclusive at least for blacks and Hispanics - two groups the GOP base hates and despises as in the image above.  I suspect most viewers figured out the ruse if they paid any attention whenever the cameras panned out across the crowd.   One group, however, didn't even bear mention other than in the party platform deemed by many to be the most reactionary in many decades.  That's right, its us gays or, using the Christofascists' terminology "sodomites."  Frank Bruni comments on this invisibility in the New York Times.  Here are excerpts:

WHAT the Republicans painstakingly constructed here was meant to look like the biggest of tents. And still they couldn’t spare so much as a sleeping bag’s worth of space for the likes of me. 

Women were welcomed. During the prime evening television hours, the convention stage was festooned with them, and when they weren’t at the microphone, they were front and center in men’s remarks. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney both gushed about their moms in tributes as tactical as they were teary. 

Latinos were plentiful and flexed their Spanish — “En América, todo es posible,” said Susana Martinez, the New Mexico governor — despite an “English First” plank in the party’s regressive platform.

And while one preconvention poll suggested that roughly zero percent of African-Americans support Romney, Republicans found several prominent black leaders to testify for him.

But you certainly didn’t see anyone openly gay on the stage in Tampa. More to the point, you didn’t hear mention of gays and lesbians. Scratch that: Mike Huckabee, who has completed a ratings-minded transformation from genial pol to dyspeptic pundit, made a derisive reference to President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage. We were thus allowed a fleeting moment inside the tent, only to be flogged and sent back out into the cold. 

It was striking because the Republicans went so emphatically far, in terms of stagecraft and storytelling, to profess inclusiveness, and because we gays have been in the news rather a lot over the last year or so, as the march toward marriage equality picked up considerable velocity. We’re a part of the conversation. And our exile from it in Tampa contradicted the high-minded “we’re one America” sentiments that pretty much every speaker spouted. It also denied where the country is so obviously headed and where so many Republicans have quietly arrived.

On the convention stage in Tampa, where estrogen was platinum and melanin was gold, Republicans spoke eloquently about a country that valued every person’s worth and was poised to reward each person’s dreams. Those words would have carried much more weight if coupled with even a glancing recognition of gay and lesbian Americans. Instead speakers tacitly let the party’s platform do the talking. It calls for the kind of constitutional amendment that Romney now supports. 

Sorry, Governor Martinez, you’re wrong. Todo no es posible. Not if you’re gay and live in Wisconsin (Ryan’s home state), Michigan (Romney’s) or 42 others and want to get married. Not if you’re gay and listened to all the soaring oratory in Tampa with the wish for one sentence or syllable of reassurance that the tent stretched all the way to you.