Debalic wrote:
Really it looks to me like the Democrats are showingassume that a *** Republican is actually working against his own best interests and that *** voters would be doing the same in supporting him.
Let me make a small adjustment to what you said. The point, which is raised by a number of gay conservatives (if you actually bother to read what they write/say about rather than what other people write/say about them), is that on the Right side of politics we don't place the same weight on identity as the Left does. We don't assume that if you are gay, that "gay issues" are the number one thing you care about. We don't assume that if you are a woman, that "women's issues" are the number one thing you care about. Same for being black, latino, jewish, catholic, etc, etc, etc.
The problem is that the Left does place great weight on identity. Also, the Left has a habit of assuming that their position on a given issue regarding identity is synonymous with that identity's "rights". So being pro-SSM is being "for gay rights" (and by extension anyone opposed to SSM is "against gay rights". This leaves them in a distinct quandary when a gay person chooses to be conservative, much less run for office as a Republican since it flies in the face of the assumptions they start with. How can someone who is gay oppose gay rights? Well, they don't. They just don't place the same weight on "gay", nor make the same assumption that any given position is equivalent for being for/against "gay rights" in general.
Remember also (as I have mentioned many many times) that conservatives do not define rights the same way liberals do. Liberals tend to equate rights with benefits provided, while conservatives only define them as the absence of restrictions. So SSM does not qualify as a "right" to conservatives. Period. A conservative's position on SSM, therefore, is less about rights than about how he feels about promoting particular types of relationships, and frankly how devoted he is to the small government idea (there is a reasonable range in this area). Main point being that it's not contradictory for a gay person to be conservative, nor a Republican. It does not mean he works against his best interests (because he defines his best interests in a broader scope than "what's good for me as a gay person").
I've said many times that the mistake liberals make is assuming that conservatives believe the same things as liberals, but just choose to take the opposite positions. That's not true at all. We really do place different weights on things, and view things differently. When we arrive at different positions, it's not because we think doing X is the right thing to do, but are evil nasty people who do the opposite out of spite. And frankly, I think it's somewhat silly when some liberals present arguments that rest on this assumption. You can't possibly really believe that half of the population are evil mustache twirling bad guys who do evil just because they like to make people suffer. Can you?
And if you can accept that we don't take our positions out of some unexplainable malice, then maybe open your mind to the sorts of explanations for our positions that we freely give whenever asked instead of just rejecting them out of hand. Just a thought.