Gay issue threatens to rip open Republican convention

There may be an all-out brawl at the Republican Convention over gay rights, according to the LA Times. We're talking an old-style open convention where they fight over the party platform, and the fight this time is over an amendment to the platform that would basically reiterate the party's "open tent" mantra, including a specific reference to agreeing to disagree about gay rights.

A few interesting points here.

1. The gay Republican group Log Cabin is poking a big ole finger in Bush's eye and I'm more than a bit surprised by it. This is a big deal what they're proposing, if only because it will totally piss off the radical right AND they are now making "gay" THE issue of the convention, which is clearly not the message the Republicans want the week devoted to.

2. The proposed language the gay Republicans want is still pretty irrelevant in that the language says you agree to disagree, then the party turns around and tries to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and possibly vitiating every single pro-gay law and corporate policy in the country, the party supports taking your kids away from you if you're gay, the party wants laws on the books that throw you in jail simply for being gay, etc. Basically, the party is going to throw everything short of Auschwitz at "the gays," but we're going to pretend that this is agreeing to disagree. It's not.

But having said all of that, this is still a gutsy move by Log Cabin - gutsy because some of their members/funders, according to my sources, are anti-gay gays who care nothing about gay civil rights and everything about protecting George Bush at all costs. Taking on their own takes cojones, and they get kudos for that. And finally, as I noted, taking on Bush and risking his convention, and thus his election, is ball-sy as well.

Hopefully they stick to their guns - that remains to be seen. As does whether the gay Republican group, Log Cabin, endorses Bush's re-election when they meet in the next few weeks. Platform language or not, what matters are the president's ACTUAL policies, and on that score, no self-respecting gay person can vote for this bigot.