GOProud or Go Home

[Valin]

National Review:

Five reasons CPAC should embrace the gay conservative group.

Daniel Foster

2/15/13

 

For the second straight year, it looks as though neither the Log Cabin Republicans nor GOProud will participate in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). There was a minor dustup when GOProud was asked to move along at last year’s conference after the group had served as a sponsor in the previous two years, and the story has been given fresh oxygen by progressive MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who said that he would accept an invitation to appear on a CPAC panel (opposite Ralph Reed) only if GOProud were welcomed back into the fold. Though I don’t agree with Hayes on much, he’s right on this one. Here are five reasons why.

 

small-g gay, small-c conservative

GOProud is consistently big-C “movement” conservative on the important issues — especially on fiscal policy and the size of government, but also on social issues such as abortion. After all, GOProud was founded by a couple of Log Cabin Republicans dissatisfied with that group’s Main-Street-partnership-style centrism. This alone is a pretty good reason for their inclusion at CPAC. But arguably more interesting, and more important for a powwow that’s ostensibly about making conservative advocacy more effective, is GOProud’s lower-case conservatism. Watch them operate and you realize that, unlike many social-issue activist groups on both the left and the right, GOProud understands that speed kills in the culture wars. A D.C. journo-acquaintance once complained to me, “What does GOProud actually do besides put out press releases?” Said journo is exaggerating, but it’s true that GOProud picks its spots. They’re playing the long game of acclimating gays to conservatism and conservatism to gays, and a large piece of that, frankly, is just sitting around quietly and behaving themselves. This is why GOProud leads with its full-spectrum conservative bona fides and why its position on gay marriage (officially agnostic and federalist, but with implied underlying support) is intentionally circumspect and backgrounded. It’s an approach that makes GOProud not only small-c conservative, but small-g gay, an illustration that one’s sexual preference does not require one to be wed to readymade big-g “Gay” identity politics.

 

(Snip)

 

contested conservatism

If there is significant internal disagreement among conservatives on any given issue, that disagreement ought to be represented at CPAC, which plays a unique role in the conservative movement. This is especially true in “wilderness” years such as this one. GOProud’s involvement in past CPACs caused a (relatively small) amount of controversy and disruption at the proceedings, and that may have been reason enough to ask them to stay home in 2012, a year in which conservative unity was especially important. But the election is over, and one of conservatism’s great intellectual strengths is that “conservatism” is a contested concept. If confabs like CPAC aren’t going to reflect the robust and vital internal debate about the present and future of conservatism, what are they good for?

 

(Snip)