gay repubs

But even some of them have started to flip-flop. They can read polls showing that support for legal recognition of gay unions is rising (by 10 points between February and May alone, from 32 to 42 percent, according to Gallup) and that voters crucial to Mr. Bush's re-election (independents, Midwesterners and professionals) are turned off by the crusade (according to The Wall Street Journal-NBC News). This explains why The Weekly Standard, which in March confidently predicted that Mr. Bush could turn a close election into a blowout by demonizing same-sex marriage, was by May reduced to begging the White House to take up this "missing issue." It's not just the White House that's shying away from it. Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have failed to bring the constitutional amendment to a vote. The conservative commentator Max Boot, formerly an editor at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, has said that the right has "already all but lost the battle" over the issue, with even the Rev. Lou Sheldon, the indefatigable gay-basher at the Traditional Values Coalition, telling The Times that he doesn't "see any traction" and has no idea why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/arts/06RICH.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Mr. Sheldon might start looking at the culture. In recent weeks, the political retreat from gay-baiting has been joined by the prime-time schedule of the unofficial Republican TV network, Fox, as well. This spring it canceled in mid-run a flop reality show called "Playing It Straight," the premise of which was to cast gay men as villains by having them pretend to be heterosexual for the purpose of humiliating women. Undaunted, the network announced a two-hour reality special, "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay," that was to have its premiere tomorrow night. According to Fox's initial press release, it called for straight men to move into West Hollywood lofts with gay roommates to experience "a heterosexual male's worst nightmare" by being schooled in the "gay lifestyle" — after which they'd be judged on the experiment's success by a "jury of their queers." After an uproar, the network re-edited the press release and, 10 days before broadcast, killed the show.

Fox's news division stubbornly stays on the case, but its last-ditch argument seems to be that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope leading to legalized polygamy. "I want to marry a guy and a babe!" exclaimed Bill O'Reilly while trying out one such scary what-if hypothesis for his viewers last month. Someone should tell the Republican conventioneers that if you throw Hugh Jackman and a pair of maracas into that same plot, you've got "The Boy From Oz."