Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"It's sometimes hard to explain to outsiders what level of principle is required to withstand the personal cost of being an out gay Republican. I've only ever been a gay conservative (never a Republican), and back in the 1990s, it was brutal living in the gay world and challenging liberal assumptions.

-- Andrew Sullivan, 5/2/2012

I have no idea what it must be like to be a gay Republican.

I also have no idea what it must be like to be a black Klansman, or a Jewish neo-Nazi.

I have no idea what it would be like to cross oceans and continents to join a movement that not only explicitly hated me, but had built the altar of their ideology upon the bedrock of their hatred of me.

But I do know that "principled" is not word I would use to describe the levels of delusional self-loathing it would take to induce me to sign onto and put my heart and soul into a movement that thought I was a subhuman pervert who would be better off never born.

I would probably use the term "Useful Idiot", but then again I am low and perverse.

And speaking of Useful Idiots, back in the 1990s (1999, specifically, in the excerpt below -- long, long after Reagan had delivered the Conservative movement to the tender mercies of filth like Jerry Falwell) Mr. Sullivan was indeed writing about being a gay conservative.

Here is a sample (note how decades of pile-driving American Conservatism reality has barely made a crease in Mr. Sullivan's shield of pure, adamantine delusion):

"[H.L. Mencken] reminds me of conservative friends who oppose almost every measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as haters, and on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real life, I know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice "toward me or other homosexuals whatsoever.

"They are as hard to figure out as those liberal friends who support every gay rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid going into a gay bar with me. I have to ask myself in the same, frustrating kind of way: are they liberal bigots or bigoted liberals? Or are they neither bigots nor liberals, but merely people?
...

"So may other forms of minority loathing -- especially hatred within minorities. I'm sure that black conservatives like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell have experienced their fair share of white racism. But I wonder whether it has ever reached the level of intensity of the hatred directed toward them by other blacks? In several years of being an openly gay writer and editor, I have experienced the gamut of responses to my sexual orientation. But I have only directly experienced articulated, passionate hate from other homosexuals. I have been accused over the years by other homosexuals of being a sellout, a hypocrite, a traitor, a sexist, a racist, a narcissist, a snob. I've been called selfish, callous, hateful, self-hating and malevolent. At a reading, a group of lesbian activists portrayed my face on a poster within the crossfires of a gun. Nothing from the religious right has come close to such vehemence.

"I am not complaining. No harm has ever come to me or my property, and much of the criticism is rooted in the legitimate expression of political differences. But the visceral tone and style of the gay criticism can only be described as hateful. It is designed to wound personally, and it often does. But its intensity comes in part, one senses, from the pain of being excluded for so long, of anger long restrained bubbling up and directing itself more aggressively toward an alleged traitor than an alleged enemy."

"Alleged" enemy.

"Alleged" traitor.

When you live cosseted inside the media bubble, everything outside is just an interesting academic exercise.

Or a game.