Journalist, Political Reporter, Cultural Critic, Editor/Proofreader
Alex V. Henderson
Philadelphia, PA
vixenatr
February 10, 2014
Gay Rights
By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, February 10, 2014
With the Republican Party having lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections in the United States, one would think that the GOP would be trying to broaden its appeal instead of pandering to the drooling lunatic fringe known as the Christian Right. Instead, too many Republicans have been doubling down on the party’s fundamentalist insanity. One of them is Mary Helen Sears, vice-chair of the Michigan Republican Party’s 1st District and a candidate for the Republican National Committee (RNC).
In a rant posted online, Sears called for gays to be “purged” from the GOP and insisted that “Satan uses homosexuality to attack the living space of the Holy Spirit.” Sears insisted that the GOP, “as a party should be purging the perversion and send them to a party with a much bigger tent.”
Sears wrote: “Our young Republicans want us to put away the old thinking of Marriage and Life. Adopt a more open attitude, accept who they are, stop the hate speech, blah, blah, blah. Yes, they have learned their lessons well. The problem is it was the wrong lesson.”
It’s no secret that the Christian Right has had a stranglehold on the Republican Party for well over 30 years. And when zealots like Sears bash gays, they are trying to rally the GOP’s base—which can be effective in a year with mid-term elections. Bigotry sells in GOP circles, although it can also rally the opposition. But for the Republican Party, the problem with catering to bigots is that doing so will only cause the GOP to continue shrinking. Exclusion will not expand the Republican Party in the longrun, only marginalize it.
The GOP’s problems, however, go way beyond alienating gays. The 2012 election results demonstrated that the Republican Party not only has a problem with gays, but also, with African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and women (while older heterosexual white males in the Deep South and some parts of the Midwest tended to favor Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, other groups overwhelmingly went for incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama).
Of course, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) won’t be losing any sleep over Sears’ hateful comments. The more the Republican Party caters to fundamentalist wingnuts and the more the GOP base shrinks, the happier the DNC will be. And there are numerous gay, black, Hispanic and female voters who are fed up with wingnuts like Sears and want the party to implode as much as possible. But as journalist Eugene Robinson (a liberal columnist who supported Obama in 2012 and has often been a guest on MSNBC) has said, one-party rule under the Democratic Party would not be a good thing. The Democratic Party, as Robinson has said, needs sane, rational competition—and the wingnuts of the modern GOP are neither sane nor rational. Robinson puts it best when he says that if Democrats win by default simply because Republicans are too extreme to win, the Democratic Party will inevitably become complacent and take its voters for granted.
Every time a wingnut like Mary Helen Sears shows her divisive nature, the Republican brand is tarnished some more. And certainly, a party with as much bigotry and extremism as the modern-day GOP should be marginalized as much as possible. But American voters, gay or otherwise, deserve options—not a climate in which Democrats automatically win simply because so many Republicans are flat-out insane.
Alex Henderson (alexvhenderson.com) is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in Salon.com, The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, Skin Two, The Pasadena Weekly, JazzTimes, Cash Box and a long list of other well-known publications. Follow him on Twitter @alexvhenderson.
Mary Helen Sears
Copyright 2022 Alex V. Henderson. All rights reserved.
Alex V. Henderson
Philadelphia, PA
vixenatr