Andrew Sullivan has officially announced, in a column for the gay magazine The Advocate, that he will not endorse or vote for President Bush this November, after doing both in 2000. While Sullivan has been critical of Bush for his handling of Iraq in the past year, his major reason for jumping ship is Bush’s attempt to codify anti-gay bigotry into the constitution. He reacts the way I probably would if, say, a president proposed amending the constitution to exclude Jews from citizenship.
(Openly bisexual blogger Asparagirl, an even more gung-ho Republican and Bush supporter than Andrew ever was, made a memorable, similar declaration- “Dear President Bush- today you lost my vote for president. Kisses, Asparagirl” – on the day Bush endorsed the FMA).
The nation’s leading gay conservative journalist for several years, Sullivan used to joke that half of his hate mail comes from gays berating him for being conservative, while the other half comes from conservatives berating him for being gay. He can expect much of both now, as the Advocate crowd likely chastise him for every supporting Bush/backing the War on Terror/endorsing the war in Iraq in the first place, while some of the more small-minded conservatives wonder why they need the homos on their side anyway. In fact, the latter have already started.
(Sullivan’s piece was published almost a month ago, but the righty blog/National Review folks didn’t catch wind of it until now, leading Andrew to discuss it on his blog for the first time. Not big Advocate readers, the Lucianne.com and Corner people).
Speaking of the Advocate, their other big talked-about piece these days is a Reagan anti-obit by noted playwright/ACT UP activist Larry Kramer. Titled “Adolf Reagan,” it of course compares the Gipper to Hitler, and speculates that the former president “murdered” hundreds of thousands of homosexuals (by not curing them of AIDS) because of anger that his son, Ron, Jr., is gay. Which must come as news to the young Reagan’s wife…
What bothers me about Kramer’s piece isn’t the Godwinization or the reckless unsubstantiated outing or the laughable hyperbole- all of that is old crap that I'm used to. It’s that the prose is so horribly shoddy, from start to finish, coming from a guy who’s supposed to be an accomplished playwright. Almost two weeks since Reagan died, and the left has yet to produce as brilliantly hateful an obit as the one Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Richard Nixon back in ’94.
Posted by Stephen Silver at June 17, 2004 06:12 PM