Scott Spiegel

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Maybe Michele Bachmann is reluctant to elaborate on her views on homosexuality with reporters because—gasp!—she doesn’t care.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, host Dick Gregory badgered Bachmann about comments she had made seven years ago on her interpretation of the Bible’s statements on homosexuality.

Since 2004, the country has radically evolved in its understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, including its approval of same-sex couples getting married and adopting.  Gay marriage is legal in six states plus D.C. and available to 11% of the country’s population.  Gay marriage was used as a wedge issue in many states in the 2004 Congressional elections, but in 2008 it was used as such primarily in the context of California’s Proposition 8.  Prominent Republicans who now support same-sex marriage include Dick Cheney, Laura and Barbara Bush, Cindy and Meghan McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, S. E. Cupp, Margaret Hoover, Ted Olsen, and Vaughn Walker.  Countless other prominent Republicans favor gay civil unions; most didn’t back in 2004.  Even Ann Coulter was recently appointed Honorary Chair of the Advisory Council for gay conservative group GOProud.

Bachmann’s views on gay issues have also presumably evolved since 2004, or else she would have racked up a lot more anti-gay statements since then.  All of the Bachmann homosexuality quotes the media have been broadcasting appear to have emanated from just two sources: a two-part March 2004 interview she gave on the local Minnesota radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News” and a November 2004 address she delivered at the EdWatch National Education Conference.  That’s it.  If Bachmann had truly been waging an anti-gay jihad for the past seven years, liberals wouldn’t have had to dig up archives of obscure evangelical talk shows and one-off education conferences from George W. Bush’s first term to find recordings of self-incriminating statements.

Bachmann’s position on gay marriage roughly mirrors President Obama’s.  Like Republicans Rick Perry and Herman Cain, she prefers allowing states to implement gay marriage if they choose—a position even Obama has barely uttered his support for.  She favors a constitutional amendment defining marriage as opposite-sex, which Obama opposes—though she well knows that such an amendment has little chance of becoming law.

If Bachmann weren’t too polite to share it, her response to repeated questions on her views on homosexuality would be, “Oh, God… not again.  Really?”

Bachmann clearly cares first and foremost about federal spending and national defense.  She became a conservative rock star two years ago as the most prominent elected official to spearhead the nascent Tea Party movement, with its primary goal of stopping ObamaCare and runaway government spending.  She has voiced vociferous, well-informed support of Israel and our military missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran to stop the threat of Islamic terrorism to the U.S.  These are the things that keep her awake at night—not whether Ellen DeGeneres gets a marriage license instead of a domestic partnership.

On Meet the Press, Bachmann addressed Gregory’s questions on homosexuality by insisting that she is not one to “judge” anyone.  She affirmed that she would not use sexual orientation as a criterion in hiring for positions in her administration or for judgeships.  Why wasn’t that a good enough answer for Gregory, who continued to hound her on her theory of human sexuality?  What was she supposed to do—declare herself a True Blood fan and invite Gregory out for cosmos?  Why don’t reporters grill Obama about his opposition to gay marriage, bludgeoning him with the same boring questions and refusing to accept his self-protective platitudes on his eternally “evolving” stance?

Liberals call Bachmann a hypocrite and claim they object to her “double-talk” and dodging questions.  They declare that they would have more respect for her if she simply endorsed her past statements point-blank.  What if she doesn’t quite believe them anymore?  What if the issue isn’t as important to her, or wouldn’t be a legislative priority for her if she became president?  Bachmann repeatedly responded to Gregory’s questions by reminding him that she is running for the presidency of the United States.  If she believes gay marriage should be dealt with by the states, then why would a President Bachmann staring down a $14 trillion deficit and a hostile Middle East worry about Neil Patrick Harris’s love life?

Liberals aren’t upset about a Bachmann presidency because they fear she would roll back gay rights or slow the national tide of increasing acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage.  As with Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, the left are using a few nutty, outdated statements to stop a genuine reformer and charismatic populist, whose views on social issues are probably evolving like everyone else’s, from getting into office.  Liberals can’t stand the fact that Bachmann might effect real change on causes that are anathema to them, such as slashing unsustainable entitlement spending and stopping the worldwide spread of Sharia.



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President Obama announced last week that his Attorney General Eric Holder would no longer be defending the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Congress passed in 1996.

His declaration may have had something to do with the fact that Ninth Circuit Court Justice Stephen Reinhardt and federal trial judge Joseph Tauro of Massachusetts ruled across three separate cases in 2009 and 2010 that DOMA was unconstitutional.

Obama’s Justice Department will be submitting its official response next week to two fresh lawsuits against DOMA filed last year in New York and Connecticut.  The Department is not expected to argue in favor of the law’s constitutionality.

Constitution-revering conservatives have responded to Obama’s announcement by howling that there is no precedent for his declaration in all of American history, that Obama is overturning DOMA just because he doesn’t like it, and that his actions may be grounds for impeachment.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed Obama has “thrown in the towel on the Constitution.”  On her radio show, Monica Crowley stooped to the level of Wisconsin pro-union protestors by labeling the president “Oba-Mubarak.”

Newt Gingrich declared that Obama’s actions could lead to a constitutional crisis.  He offered the hypothetical counterexample of President Sarah Palin declaring that she doesn’t like Roe v. Wade, thinks it’s unconstitutional, and will no longer allow the executive to enforce the right to an abortion.

There’s just one little difference between the Obama and Gingrich scenarios: no court has ever ruled Roe v. Wade unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, had the last word on that matter in 1973, and no lower court or the Supreme Court has declared the unconstitutionality of the fundamental right to an abortion since then.  State courts have chipped away at the edges of the ruling and allowed restrictions on abortion, some of which the Supreme Court has upheld, but no court has ever reversed the Supreme Court’s ruling on the basic right to an abortion.  In fact, because the Supreme Court has already ruled on the matter, only that court would be able to reverse its 1973 ruling.

In the Gingrich scenario, Palin would indeed be imposing her preference on the nation illegally.

In the Obama scenario, in contrast, his Justice Department would be upholding the interpretation of the law offered by two members of the judiciary in three different court cases.

Obama hasn’t even said his Justice Department isn’t going to enforce the law—only that it will not be arguing in court that the law is constitutional.  Which, you may remember, is what two of the highest courts in the land to rule on the constitutionality of DOMA have found in three separate cases.

Even after Obama’s announcement, courts will still be able to rule on DOMA, regardless of the arguments Eric Holder declines to proffer in support of it.  Outside parties, including Congressmen who support the law, will still be able to file friend-of-the-court briefs outlining the exact same by-now-familiar arguments the Justice Department will no longer be citing.

Other conservatives who are upset with Obama’s actions have argued that Florida District Court Justice Roger Vinson recently found ObamaCare unconstitutional, yet Obama is still implementing that law.

Well, yes—clearly Obama is ideologically disposed toward overturning DOMA and not Roe v. Wade or ObamaCare.  But that doesn’t mean he does not have the prerogative to disavow the identified-as-unconstitutional DOMA, or the obligation to uphold the never-identified-as-unconstitutional Roe v. Wade.

As for ObamaCare, two justices had already (ludicrously) upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare before Virginia District Justice Henry Hudson ruled the individual mandate component of the bill unconstitutional last December, and before Justice Vinson ruled the entire bill unconstitutional in January.  So while one would hope for Obama to take Hudson and Vinson’s cues once their rulings came down, one wouldn’t hold one’s breath.  A third justice has since found ObamaCare constitutional, which sadly gives liberals more cover for continuing to defend ObamaCare until the Supreme Court rules on it.

In the same interview in which he claimed Obama couldn’t decline to enforce DOMA, Gingrich declared that Justice Vinson’s ruling represented “solid grounds for the House to cut off all funding for implementation.”  Apparently the link between Gingrich’s stances on DOMA and ObamaCare was that both criticized supposedly unconstitutional actions of Obama’s.  Yet evidently Justice Reinhardt and Tauro’s rulings on the unconstitutionality of DOMA didn’t figure into Gingrich’s equation.

Other conservatives have questioned the timing of Obama’s announcement, suggesting that it was made to distract voters from the economy or set a trap for Republicans—as though this determined the propriety of Obama’s non-enforcement of a law.  Gingrich noted that Obama had campaigned for president in opposition to gay marriage and promised to uphold DOMA, and is therefore breaking a campaign pledge—again, as though this has anything to do with the legality of Obama’s decision not to defend the law.

Without trying to read Obama’s mind, I can say only that his motives for no longer defending DOMA have absolutely nothing to do with the constitutional appropriateness of his decision.

Here are some hypothetical actions that would be unconstitutional if Obama actually took them: Not enforcing DOMA after the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional.  Enforcing DOMA after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Implementing ObamaCare after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Implementing ObamaCare after Congress cut off funding for implementing it.

But deciding not to defend an argument behind one section of a law while still enforcing it, when two of the highest courts in the land have deemed the law unconstitutional in three cases—sorry, but that is not unconstitutional.



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President Barack Obama demonstrated his pro-gay credentials last week by having Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett renounce comments she had made that 15-year-old gay suicide victim Justin Aaberg had been bullied because of a “lifestyle choice” he had made.

Obama backed up Jarrett by announcing at an MTV townhall meeting that being gay is “not a choice,” thus discovering something Ronald Reagan figured out 32 years ago.

The remarks topped off a busy week of fierce advocacy from our Fierce Advocate for gay rights, coming as it did after Obama’s Justice Department filed a fierce brief appealing U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro’s overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and an advocatory brief appealing U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips’ injunction against Pentagon enforcement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT).

The administration evidently hates DADT so much that it disobeyed Philips’ injunction and upheld the law by allowing a Texas recruiting station to refuse reenlistment to decorated veteran Omar Lopez, who had been ousted after five years of service in the Navy for “homosexual admission.”

Obama has been insisting that DADT “will end on my watch.”  Given his actions over the past year-and-a-half, perhaps what he really means is that when someone—anyone—other than him takes steps to repeal it, he’ll be “sure to watch.”

Meanwhile, evidence for the administration’s ludicrous claim that immediate lifting of the ban will have “enormous consequences” for the military has yet to materialize.

In the midst of all this fierce advocacy, the national gay Republican group Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) won an actual victory last Tuesday, in the form of Phillips’ injunction against DADT, the next step in the resolution of the case LCR had successfully filed opposing the policy.

LCR and fellow gay conservative group GOProud also called out New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino for his lunkheaded complaints to a group of conservative orthodox rabbis in the Bronx that homosexuality was not a “successful or valid” option and that schools shouldn’t “brainwash” students into accepting it.

The effect of denouncements by these and other Republican groups was that Paladino almost entirely walked back his comments within 24 hours of being criticized, concluding with this statement on Tuesday—“I am 100 percent unequivocally pro gay rights, except for one thing: gay marriage”—which, if true, technically puts him on the same place on the political spectrum on gay issues as Obama.  (A report late last week that Paladino had once been the landlord for two popular Buffalo gay clubs, Cobalt and Buddies II, arguably makes him even more fabulous than Obama.)

Paladino remarked, “I’ve been a high supporter of the gay community my entire career and I will continue to be.  The Log Cabin people know that.  The gay community in Buffalo knows that.  They know my nature and they know the way I’ve been.  The real message is getting out.”

As regressive as Paladino is in his personal beliefs, he is indisputably more susceptible to moderation on gay issues than his rival Andrew Cuomo is on taxes, government regulation, and state interference in economic matters.  Did I miss Cuomo’s public statement asserting, “I’ve been a high supporter of the Constitution and limited government my entire career and I will continue to be.  The Tea Party people know that.  The conservatives in Albany know that.  They know my nature and they know the way I’ve been.  The real message is getting out.”

Paladino’s reversal cost him the endorsement of Rabbi Yehuda Levin, leader of the Orthodox Jewish community to whom Paladino originally made his statements on homosexuality, thus negating the effect of his making the comments in the first place.

Anyway, what role will Paladino actually have in gay issues in his (self-declared) one term as governor, except for vetoing gay marriage should it pass (he has stated he will uphold it if decided in a referendum)?  In contrast, is Cuomo as susceptible to withdrawing his support for crippling taxes on high earners, ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, etc., in the 12 terms he’ll serve if voted into office?

Paladino’s lieutenant governor candidate Greg Edwards similarly demonstrated his loathing of gays by attending a Log Cabin political action committee fundraiser at the Soldiers’ Sailors’ Marines’ Coast Guard & Airmen’s Club in Manhattan last Tuesday, the day Paladino apologized for his comments.  The event’s speakers included New York Republican State Committee Chairman Ed Cox and two pro-gay marriage Republican New York State Assembly members, as well as Republican minority leader B. Dean Skelos, who promised to bring gay marriage back up for a vote if the GOP becomes the majority party next year and urged all Republicans to feel free to “vote their conscience.”

In other recent Republicans-are-doing-more-for-gays-than-Obama news, Republican-appointed Republican judge Vaughn Walker overturned the anti-gay marriage referendum Prop 8 in California two months ago.  The lawsuit was filed by the two lawyers who argued Bush v. Gore in 2000, and the effort was spearheaded by one of them (hint: it was the Republican).

The growing list of prominent Republicans who support same-sex marriage now includes: Dick Cheney, Ted Olson, Laura Bush, Glenn Beck, Cindy McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The list of Democrats who oppose gay marriage still includes: Barack Obama.

For 20 months, the Obama administration has been steadily doing everything it can to bolster the case that Democratic politicians are no better on gay issues than Republican politicians.  Last week was merely a banner week for Obama’s demonstration of this fact.



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• Is Obama’s Excuse for Not Repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Legitimate? (newsweek.com)
• Gay marriage surfaces as an issue in state races (yahoo.com)
• Military recruiters told to accept gay applicants (yahoo.com)
• WH’s Jarrett: Dead Gay Bully Victim Made ‘Lifestyle Choice’ (mpetrelis.blogspot.com)
• Discharged Gay vet refused re-enlistment despite lack of DADT law (gay.americablog.com)

As the newly appointed Dean of Harvard Law School, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan decided, in the middle of the War on Terror, to cripple the Reserve Officer Training Corps’ recruitment capability on campus by denying it crucial access to funding, operating space, and assistance from the Office of Career Services.

Kagan’s action fits into a shameful history of antiwar college administrators’ kicking ROTC off university campuses nationwide, most visibly at Ivy League schools, out of opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 60s and 70s.  After the war ended, officials extended the policy out of supposed concern over the military’s ban on gays in the 80s and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the 90s.

After the Solomon Amendment barring federal funding to universities that ban military recruitment on campus was fully implemented at Harvard in 2003, Kagan signed on to a legal challenge to the amendment.  The Third Circuit Court overturned the amendment in 2004, but stayed its ruling pending Supreme Court review.  Kagan, impatient with the vagaries of the legal system, decided to force Harvard back onto its anti-ROTC policy, even though the law hadn’t yet been changed.  The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Third Circuit ruling in 2006, at which point Kagan reversed her actions to comply with the ruling.

Gay rights supporters defend Kagan’s actions as a necessary stopgap against government-sponsored military discrimination.

It is instructive to reconsider Kagan’s stance in the context of the role our military plays, the people and the rights it protects, and our enemies’ attitudes toward individual liberty and their treatment of gays.

Who, for example, benefits from the protections the U.S. military provides its citizens—only straight people, or gays as well?

Who protects the rights of citizens of our country, in which gays may live more or less as they please; form relationships with same-sex partners; enter (in a growing number of states) into civil unions, domestic partnerships, and marriages; adopt (in a growing number of states) and raise children; file lawsuits if they believe they have been unlawfully discriminated against; push to change laws to promote equality with heterosexuals; protest for their rights and hold rallies and parades in America’s major cities; and engage our political leaders in debate about allowing gays to serve openly in the military?

How do governments treat gays in countries that are our adversaries—in particular, those that fund, sponsor, and sympathize with the war to defeat gay-tolerant Western civilization and promote radical Islam around the world?  Do these Islamic governments have the same enlightened perspective on gays as the U.S., or do they condemn gays and throw them in jail or execute them for homosexual behavior?

The left in this country has traditionally demonized or devalued the military—at worst, it is for them a barbaric, fascist, industrial complex that sparks unnecessary wars and engages in brutal imperialist conquests.  At best, it is for them a largely unseen, slightly tacky presence whose benefits they take for granted, just as they take for granted our capitalist economy’s wealth, which they seek to appropriate and redistribute with no concern for the effort required to create it.

As many soldiers pointed out during the Iraq War, our military protects the right of antiwar liberals to protest the military’s actions.  What a slap in the face it is to bar or hobble the military in recruiting the brightest students from the best universities across the country to help complete its mission.  Imagine if military recruiters were similarly barred from other U.S. institutions and were unable to recruit enough members to fill its ranks.

As liberal, DADT-opposing Peter Beinart wrote, “The United States military is not Procter and Gamble.  It is not just another employer.  It is the institution whose members risk their lives to protect the country.  You can disagree with the policies of the American military; you can even hate them; but you can’t alienate yourself from the institution without in a certain sense alienating yourself from the country.”

Kagan’s ROTC-bashing position is also counterproductive, in that it further isolates the military from liberal views and entrenches in the left the mindset that the military is hard-line and unreformable.  And how is spitting on ROTC fair to soldiers, commanders, and potential recruits who oppose DADT or might be gay themselves?

The American Spectator’s John Tabin, who also supports repealing DADT, notes, “[I]f you want a military leadership with more liberal views on homosexuality, you should be more reluctant to entrench this cultural estrangement, not less.”  The policy of banning or restricting ROTC is just another example of leftists prematurely deciding that debate on an issue is over, those who disagree with them should no longer have a voice in the conversation, and dissenters do not deserve to be persuaded out of their positions or treated with respect.

Although DADT is misguided, treating recruiters shabbily is merely one way for liberals to disguise their contempt for the military and its unapologetic defense of American values around the world.  The day that DADT is repealed, leftist college administrators will be scouring the horizon for some other excuse to ban recruitment at their schools.

As Beinart wrote, “Barring the military from campus is a bit like barring the president or even the flag.”  But liberals can’t ban the American flag, can they?  Oh, wait—yes they can!

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Discouraging military service, bean counting minority group members instead of evaluating achievement, injecting irrelevant sexual undertones—sound like conservative stances to me!

As Miss Manners once wrote on sexual orientation, the important distinction these days seems to be not gays vs. straights, but people who think other people’s sex lives are open for scrutiny vs. those who don’t.

A rapidly dwindling number of conservatives have been arguing that the military should preserve its ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The U.S.’s highest ranking military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, happens to disagree.  In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, he declared in no uncertain terms that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nation’s other top defense official, testified alongside Mullen in support of repealing the ban.

Just before President Obama took office, 104 retired admirals and generals had signed a statement urging the next president to overturn the ban.

Apparently all of this wasn’t good enough for Senator John McCain, who had categorically stated in 2006, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”  Last week McCain told Mullen and Gates that he still opposes lifting the ban.

I can understand some conservatives’ suspicion regarding overturning the ban on gays in the military, when the last president who tried to do so (Clinton) had nothing but contempt for the military and aggressively eroded its capabilities every year he was in office.

But those opposed to lifting the ban have offered a lame series of unrelated, “they doth protest too much”-sounding excuses more befitting liberals’ shifting defenses of their misguided and unconstitutional policies.

For example, there’s the argument that we shouldn’t “experiment” with the military while we’re in the middle of two wars.

I notice that we weren’t in the middle of any wars in 1993, when President Clinton first proposed lifting the ban.  If anything, we need more recruits now, due to the notoriously long and repeated tours of duty our soldiers have had to undergo in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for specialized recruits such as Arabic translators.

The notion that our current roster of troops could do their jobs better if they weren’t distracted by the presence of the estimated 65,000 gay U.S. troops helping them out is ludicrous.  The more soldiers who are trained and willing to fight our wars, the better.  One of the best conservative arguments for the greatness of the U.S. is that we are able to get so many highly qualified people to volunteer for our military, and that so few leave due to conflict or dissatisfaction.

The necessity of maximizing troop strength during wartime is also reflected by the fact that the number of troops discharged for being gay decreased almost every year from 2001 to 2009, even though general military enlistment was up after the September 11 attacks.

For what it’s worth, we did experiment with this policy in recent history, and during a war at that: the ban on discharging gays was suspended during the Persian Gulf War, with no adverse consequences.

Then there’s the highly objective and verifiable suggestion that homosexuality is “incompatible” with military service.

This flimsy proposition is torn to smithereens by the inconvenient facts that gays: (1) currently serve honorably in the military, (2) have served honorably in the military since our country’s founding, and (3) already serve openly in the military in 30 major countries around the world, including nearly every NATO member and other U.S. allies such as Australia and Israel.  American soldiers serve alongside openly gay soldiers in these armies, and I haven’t heard about any mass defections on their part over fellow gay soldiers’ unprofessional conduct.

Conservatives generally reject affirmative action, correctly viewing the policy as amounting to reverse discrimination.  Why are so many conservatives hell-bent on discriminating against gays in the military?  It is true that some conservatives probably fear the day when gay rights groups start pushing for loosened standards for gays in the military to promote diversity or to right historical wrongs.  But just because the same thing happened with race and gender doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have granted equal rights to African Americans and women.

Violent felons, card-carrying Marxists, and radical Islamists may all happily serve in the U.S. army.  What sense does it make that, say, an Episcopalian Log Cabin Republican can’t?  Even a gay person who never utters a word about his sexual orientation in the military can be discharged for the act of getting married in one of the five states that allow it.

There’s also the contention that unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Yet the same claim was made regarding racial integration of the military in the 1950s.  This assertion slanders dedicated service members by purporting that (1) gay soldiers can’t do their jobs without making sexual advances toward their peers, and (2) heterosexual soldiers can’t do their jobs without dwelling on the possibility of advances from their peers.  Here I thought conservatives were the ones who held our military in such high esteem.

Admittedly, gays are asking for a tall order from the military: namely—nothing.  Nothing needs to be done to allow gays to serve openly, except for our Commander-in-Chief or Congress to declare that it be so.  Gays already serve.  Heterosexual service members claim they already know who many of their gay unit members are and don’t care.  If heterosexual soldiers can discern the most obvious cases and aren’t uncomfortable around these people, I think they can tolerate the existence of cases so undetectable they otherwise wouldn’t have guessed if they hadn’t found out.

All the military needs to do now is stop wasting time and resources sniffing out gays like contraband and axing them after having spent millions of dollars to train them.

Leftists are usually the ones infusing sexual undercurrents and lurid motives where none exist—pointing out latent homoeroticism in “Winnie the Pooh” or condemning “heteronormativity” in Jane Austen.  Why are some conservatives so intent on insisting that the seething, passionate impetus undergirding military service is… gay lust?

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Two ineluctable facts stand out when scrutinizing politicians’ actions on gay issues over the past 30 years: (1) Republicans are not anti-gay and (2) Democrats are not pro-gay. By 2009, there are few differences between Republican and Democratic politicians on gay issues, except that Democrats are more likely to jerk gay voters around and Republicans are more likely to quietly favor pro-liberty stances. There may have been a difference between the two parties once, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.

In 1978, California governor Ronald Reagan opposed the Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gays from teaching in public schools. In an op-ed penned as he was beginning his presidential campaign, Reagan wrote, “Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” This, in the late 70s, while Jimmy Carter was publicly refusing to meet with gay groups. The initiative was overwhelmingly defeated, mostly due to Reagan’s efforts, and this momentum was instrumental in forming the Log Cabin Republicans.

Reagan was the first president to invite two openly gay men—interior decorator Ted Graber and his partner—to spend the night at the White House. Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser called Reagan a “closet tolerant.” If Reagan was closeted, it was because no one asked him his views, not because he was hiding anything.

The number of gays discharged from the military dropped every year under Reagan. In contrast, the number of gays discharged increased every full year under Bill Clinton except one, doubling from 617 in 1994 to 1,231 in 2000. The number of gays discharged decreased again every full year under George W. Bush except one, halved from 1,273 in 2001 to 612 in 2006. Gay rights groups report the number of gays discharged over decades, but they never break it down by administration, because the numbers make Democrats look bad and Republicans look good.

More recently, Obama claimed he would repeal the ban on gays in the military—and has spent precisely zero time working to fulfill this promise. He refused to issue an executive order staying the investigation of gays until the law is changed, and is content destroying through inaction the military careers of servicemen like Arabic translator Dan Choi.

Our Gay Marriage Opponent-in-Chief kicked off his inauguration with an invocation by Rick Warren, robust financial sponsor of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. Happy days are here again!

Independent Gay Forum reports that around the 100-day mark of Obama’s presidency, WhiteHouse.gov removed discussion of almost all gay issues from its Civil Rights page including mention of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, cut its number of “promises” to gays from eight to three, and slashed discussion of gay issues from half a page to a few sentences. After bloggers objected, some material returned but not the promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act or a quote about gay civil rights. “Change we can believe in” apparently means “we can be confident that campaign promises to gays will get scrubbed from Obama’s website on a regular basis.”

In Washington D.C., former Democratic mayor Marion Barry recently woke up from a nap to realize he had accidentally voted with a unanimous City Council to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, and subsequently asked the council for a do-over so he could take back his vote.

Meanwhile, gay-friendly candidates and policies are making inroads even in the religious wing of the Republican Party. In the 2008 presidential primaries, televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Guiliani, the most pro-gay major Republican candidate, a man who shacked up with a gay male couple after his divorce and promised them if New York ever legalized gay marriage he would preside over their ceremony.

Focus on the Family, James Dobson’s group, recently expressed their openness to a gay Obama Supreme Court nominee: “The issue is not their sexual orientation. It’s whether they are a good judge or not.” Sexual orientation “should never come up. It’s not even pertinent to the equation.”

If, in 2009, gays want to support the Democratic Party because they happen to agree with every one of their non-gay-related positions, fine. It’s a bit suspicious that so many gays tout the full Democratic Party line, from global warming to Guantanamo Bay. But if they’re voting for Democrats because of their superior stance on gay issues, they’re not getting much out of the bargain.

How about these “pro-gay” positions? Republicans are more aggressive than Democrats in the war against Islamic extremists, who are extraordinarily harsh in their condemnation and punishment of gays.

Republicans are tougher on law enforcement than Democrats—a boon for gays, who are more likely to suffer bias crimes. Republicans are more likely to support gun rights, as in the recent D.C. gun law Supreme Court case, which included as plaintiff a gay man who wanted to protect himself against anti-gay violence.

Republicans favor lower taxes than Democrats, and gays have more disposable income than heterosexuals.

Why is the Republican Party the real pro-gay party? The fact that Republican politicians aren’t anti-gay and Democratic politicians aren’t pro-gay helps. The fact that Republican positions make more sense than Democratic positions on some gay issues (e.g., opposing “hate crimes” laws for preferred minority groups-of-the-moment) also helps. But the main reason is that the Republican Party is more inclined to protect individual liberties, inarguably in economic realms, and even in some social realms (e.g., smoking and nutrition-related). They’re more likely to support tough law enforcement that allows liberties to be protected. And they’re more likely to support national defense, which allows us to maintain a country that protects liberties in the first place.

If the Republican Party is better for this country, and the party that is better for this country is better for all of us, then the Republican Party is the real pro-gay party.