‘Cancer’ Of Anti-Gay Bigotry Leads Gay Republican Group Founder To Quit GOP

var addthis_config = {“data_track_addressbar”:true};Jimmy LaSalvia is not one for who speaks softly by padding or editing his words to make them sound nice.

In a 2011 Twitter conversation with right-wing FBI informant Brandon Darby, LaSalvia tagged me and wrote, “the gay left is the most hateful intolerant group in the country,” adding, “it’s nothing new, just the way they are.”

Repeating his boilerplate language a few weeks later on NPR, LaSalvia said on “The Brian Lehrer Show,” that the “gay Left is, by far, the most intolerant toward us” — “us” being gay Republicans.

LaSalvia is the co-founder and former executive director of GOProud, a gay Tea Party Republican group that never really accomplished much — except throwing a few fundraisers (including one headlined by anti-gay conservative Ann Coulter, who had no problem then or now attacking and mocking LGBT people) and raising a ruckus every chance they got.

Tossing out verbal grenades was actually just common conversation for GOProud’s co-founders, at least in 2011. “The gay left = the American Taliban. Hateful, angry and dumb as shit,” tweeted GOProud co-founder Chris Barron in January 2011.

“More and more Republican candidates are understanding that” there’s a large conservative gay vote, LaSalvia claimed as well, adding, “and making their case to gay voters.”

But now that same-sex marriage is increasingly becoming the law of the land, LaSalvia is moving on — from the Republican party.

In a widely-discussed post this week on his own blog — “Jimmy LaSalvia | A Voice for the New Majority!,” LaSalvia writes:

Today, I joined the ranks of unaffiliated voters. I am every bit as conservative as I’ve always been, but I just can’t bring myself to carry the Republican label any longer. You see, I just don’t agree with the big-government ‘conservatives’ who run the party now.

But the real reason he is getting the attention he craves is that LaSalvia has finally come to realize what “the most hateful intolerant group in the country” — the “gay left” — has known all along.

The other reason I am leaving is the tolerance of bigotry in the GOP. The current leadership lacks the courage to stand up to it – I’m not sure they ever will.

After years rising through the ranks of the Log Cabin Republicans, LaSalvia quit, reportedly because the decades-old gay GOP group had drifted too far to the left.

And now he’s quitting the GOP altogether — but not without some self-congratulatory reflection.

“I have worked hard to help to create an atmosphere on the right where conservatives can openly support gay Americans and even support same-sex marriage,” LaSalvia continues in his blog post. “In that effort, we have won, but there is more work to do to root out the anti-gay and other forms of bigotry in the party.”

“In that effort, we have won”? Really?

(Barack Obama’s words during the 2012 debates come to mind: “Please, Governor, continue”…)

That’s the same claim of success Chris Barron voiced when he and LaSalvia “quit” daily operations at GOProud, after LaSalvia wrote on  Twitter, “I’ve just about had it with faggots who line their pockets with checks from anti-gay homophobes while throwing the rest of us under the bus.” He later deleted that tweet. Barron shortly thereafter clarified, tweeting, “Rick Perry’s pollster & strategist is a gay guy. Totally disgusting.”

That outing of Perry’s pollster caused Andrew Breitbart to quit the board of GOProud.

Explaining their “resignations,” Barron at the time told Buzzfeed, “The reason why GOProud has been so successful is because we have brought new ideas and new energy to the arena. At some point, what was the outside-the-box thinking all of the sudden becomes the box, and so now, that’s the way that GOProud does things. It’s our box. It seems crazy to everyone else, but, for us, it’s like standard operating procedure. It’s time for someone else to come in and shake things up.”

Given the extent of anti-gay animus and outright hate on the Right — including from Republicans, Tea Party members, and conservatives in general — it’s hard to accept LaSalvia’s (or Barron’s) claims of being “successful” or having “won,” but perhaps winning is in the eye of the beholder.

GOProud did have one “win,” however.

In fact, it was one year ago this week that GOProud decided to throw in the towel and officially support same-sex marriage. That’s right, the LGBT organization did not officially support marriage equality until last January — after the 2012 election, in which they endorsed Mitt Romney.

Yes, despite Mitt Romney in 2012 supporting a federal marriage amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage as an institution between a man and a woman, despite Mitt Romney claiming that hospital visitation for gay couples are “benefits” and not rights, and despite Mitt Romney telling a group of LGBT parents, “I didn’t know you had families,” GOProud endorsed Mitt Romney. They even claimed Romney was “light years better” than Barack Obama.

Worse, GOProud even had said they would support Michele Bachmann, were she the party’s nominee.

In an exclusive interview with The Raw Story’s David Ferguson, published this morning, LaSalvia “likened being a gay man and ‘team player’ in the Republican Party to being the parent of a crack-addicted teen.”

“I’ve found myself in a situation where I’m beating my head against a wall,” said LaSalvia, “trying to help an organization that does not share my values. My values do not tolerate bigotry.”
…

“That’s the question,” he said, “whether they’re going to go the way of the Dixiecrats, whether they’re going to hold on to their bigotry to the bitter end. And I think they might.”

“I liken what I did in leaving the party this week,” he said, “to tough love parenting. You try to help your drug-addicted child to the point where you just have to put your foot down and cut them off because they’ve got to hit bottom before they’re going to realize.”

“I thought that they had hit bottom after the last election. And they even did treatment in the form of an autopsy report,” he said, “but they still haven’t given up their crack.”

Talking about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ now-infamous “GOP autopsy,” a report detailing where the Republican Party went wrong during the 2012 election cycle and what they need to do to win elections, LaSalvia told the Raw Story:

“To me, the autopsy kind of seems a year later like they’ve taken a terminally ill cancer patient in for a makeover,” he said. “She feels good, she looks great, but at the end of the day, the cancer’s going to kill her unless you cut it out of her.”

Curiously, LaSalvia is responsible for bringing RNC Committeeman Dave Agema‘s latest, ugly, anti-gay attack to light.

Agema last year Agema had posted on his Facebook page a link to a website that labels gay people as “filthy,” claims the “median age of death of lesbians is 45 (only 24% live past age 65),” “Homosexuals are 100 times more likely to be murdered,” “25-33% of homosexuals and lesbians are alcoholics,” “50% of suicides can be attributed to homosexuals,” and “78% of homosexuals are affected by STDs.”

Las week, Agema praised Vladimir Purtin’s anti-gay laws as “Common sense in Russia!”

LaSalvia didn’t mention that in his GOP resignation.

Meanwhile, will LaSalvia’s leaving the Republican Party make a difference?

Perhaps the answer is based on one question: Did LaSalvia make a difference when he was in the Republican Party?

Last March, LaSalvia spoke at the at the University of Pittsburgh:

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Apparently, the answer, less than one year later, to “can you be gay and a conservative,” is, “no.”

Image via Jimmy LaSalvia’s Facebook page