One of the highlights of last year’s CPAC was the way the conference defied gay-hating organizations to stand by GOProud’s inclusion, which was winningly symbolized at the prior year’s conference when an anti-gay speaker was booed off the stage. Unfortunately, the American Conservative Union bowed to pressure in July, voting to exclude the group from CPAC 2012.
Months after that decision, Andrew Breitbart resigned from the board of GOProud over the group’s outing of a Rick Perry staffer.
It was against that backdrop that Liz Glover confronted Andrew Breitbart Friday night, in the
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I was in the lounge, cursing at my computer as it continued to fail at everything, when I noticed a crowd gathered around Breitbart, and that uncomfortable disturbance in The Force when something awkward is going down. Glover was pressing Breitbart over GOProud’s exclusion, and over his split with the group (which he called “complicated”), when he began to attack Glover’s line of questioning. That’s when I grabbed my camera.
Glover defended herself from the charge that her questioning consisted of an “op-ed” by reminding Breitbart that “My stuff was on BreitbartTV last week!”
Breitbart paused, and asked, “How do you get your eyes to do the pinwheel thing?”
“That’s really sweet,” Glover replied, “picking on reporters.”
At this point, Dana Loesch tagged in, and told Glover to “act like a lady,” and that she needed to “up (her) game.”
Breitbart waded back in momentarily, then walked off, leaving Loesch to scold Glover for the “faulty premise” of her questions. While Breitbart’s split with GOProud is arguably justified, though, the ACU’
Glover stood her ground, and turned her focus on Cynthia Yockey, who wrote, for The Advocate, that LGBT equality would “come from the right.”
I first met Cynthia at my very first CPAC, and while I like her very much, this is an offensive premise, akin to saying that a reduction in violent crime will come from murderers. The right is, and has long been, the primary obstacle to LGBT equality, and even Yockey’s piece is centered on the idea that equality can only occur by begging conservatives for it:
The bad news is that regardless of this vast support from the right, LGBTs on the left have only about a year to learn the language of conservatism and persuade the conservative movement that we have an unalienable right to equality. That’s because conservatives now control a majority of state legislatures and probably will also control the White House and Congress come 2013. Passing an anti–marriage equality amendment to the Constitution in Congress and getting it ratified by the states probably will be one of the first things conservatives will do, unless LGBT folks start supporting Breitbart, GOProud, and others on the right who are making real changes in our favor.
That’s some seriously twisted logic. The entire argument in favor of gay conservatism seems to be that it’s possible, even preferable, to be more greedy than gay,
As for Breitbart, he has long supported gay conservatives, but unless his position has changed since the last time we spoke about it, he says he is “agnostic” on the question of gay marriage. Conservatives love to hide behind President Obama’s “evolving” views on gay marriage, but you could hardly make the case that Andrew Breitbart, who props up a political movement dedicated to codifying inequality, is better, no matter how many awesome parties he throws.
Here’s the clip, from Friday evening: