In this great pluralistic nation of ours, there’s a little bit of X in every Y. If turkeys were enfranchised, a few of them really would vote for Thanksgiving, so we shouldn’t be surprised—as Sunday’s New York Times would like us to be—that while lesbian Republicans might be a “rare breed,” they really do exist.
If we take the Times story at face value, GOP dykes are apparently outnumbered by rude dykes. Cathy Smith, a Republican teacher and lesbian in North Carolina, told the paper that liberal lesbians have “reacted more negatively to her political views than conservatives do to her sexual orientation.”
There are discourteous people everywhere, but I’d love to know what that negative reaction from the libs looked like. A scowl? A disparaging remark to the news that the sister swings red? Maybe even anger? The GOP’s anti-gay animus, on the other hand, sometimes takes the form of actively working to withhold gay men and lesbians’ civil rights. So while you can be both conservative and a lesbian—this is news?—it’s still hard to imagine a Republican party that’s cool with it.
Of course, political affiliation, like sexuality, is fluid. As a supporter of the Iraq war, I almost voted for George W. Bush in 2004. It was the realization that I might be voting indirectly for a Supreme Court justice who didn’t think me worthy of a whole bunch of rights and responsibilities that kept me with the rest of the gay turkeys.
