Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis Wants To Have A Bourbon With GOProud’s Barron

The Daily Caller’s Matt K. Lewis really wants to have a shot of Bourbon with gay Tea Party Republican group GOProud’s chairman Chris Barron. Or so he says in yet another gushing, fawning profile published today. Lewis, fresh from publishing what appears to be a flawed exposé of Marcus Bachmann’s gas expenses on the campaign trail, writes, “It’s 11:03 in the morning and Chris Barron, chairman of the gay conservative group GOProud, is handing me a bottle of bourbon. The fact that Dick Cheney’s face is on the bottle tempts me to take a swig. But I’m a professional; I drink coffee.”

Really? It’s the Daily Caller, the rag that failed faux journalist and conservative pundit Tucker Carlson — the man whose credibility was toast the day Jon Stewart handed him his bow tie on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004 — heads, Matt, not Rolling Stone.

“We are in the stylish basement offices of GOProud… A Gadsden flag hangs proudly from the wall behind me — next to a “Rudy!” yard sign,” Lewis writes.

Make no mistake, folks, the next time one of you challenges my description of GOProud as a Tea Party group.

“They are anxious to talk because, for a long time, they have been silent. Even after news broke about CPAC, they simply issued a short statement. ‘We did everything we could to avoid a fight,’ says GOProud executive director Jimmy LaSalvia. ‘It’s been like Neville Chamberlain around here. It’s been appease, appease, appease, appease’.”

That’s Jimmy LaSalvia, a full-time media attention addict and anti-hate crime law activist, aka GOProud’s co-founder.

And you know how GOProud appeases. Repeatedly.

Lewis writes, “Half of our membership is not gay,” says Barron. As if that’s a plus. (And, how would he know?) Barron, given what some describe as their “self-​loathing,” might be thrilled if 100% of their membership were not gay.

Consider this.

Long-time LGBT activist and recent recipient of an NGLJA journalism award, Michelangelo Signorile, in May, wrote in an Advocate op-​ed, “First off, denialists and elitists who believe they are superior to other gays — even if the attitude masks a pitiful self-​loathing — are clearly as prevalent as ever in the LGBT movement, except that they can now be out of the closet. Perversely, the fact that we can find such people in GOProud is a measure of our success.”

Signorile wrote that GOProud “supports outspokenly anti-​equality public figures — from Ann Coulter, who was paid to speak to the group, to Donald Trump, who is opposed to any gay unions — and targeted gay congressman Barney Frank during the 2010 election with an ad that called him ‘catty,’ chalking it up it — including GOProud’s ‘self-loathing’ — to ‘a desire to be close to power; a hunger for attention and GOP approval; a selfish devotion to Republican ‘fiscal’ policies over civil rights; and a belligerence toward gay activists, whom they seem to detest.”

Signorile added, “GOProud is opposed to the proposed Employment Non-​Discrimination Act and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which is now law,” and that GOProud and co-​founder Chris Baron, “support House speaker John Boehner defending section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in federal appeals court after President Obama announced he believed the law is unconstitutional — though Barron himself is legally married to a man in Washington, D.C. Barron’s husband, to whom he refers a lot in his tweets, is a D.C. teacher who wrote a piece in MetroWeekly about how kids learn to be bullies from adults who bully one another. But there couldn’t possibly be a better example of an adult bullying other adults than Barron tweeting this: ‘The gay left = the American Taliban. Hateful, angry and dumb as shit.’ He’s also tweeted that Andrew Sullivan is ‘fat,’ ‘pathetic,’ and ‘self-​important’ and that Meghan McCain is ‘intensely stupid’.”

Back to Lewis, who quotes Barron bragging, “Dick Cheney has a more progressive position on marriage than GOProud does.”

Lewis adds, “Privately, some conservatives who might have been open to the possibility of working with GOProud tell me they doubt the group’s sincerity. As evidence, they note that Barron (who is a media consultant, a self-described practicing Catholic, and a Herman Cain donor) worked for Planned Parenthood in 2005. This is an inconvenient truth.”

As are so many things about GOProud.

 

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