HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
THE PINK ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
surfaced that he had sent suggestive emails to underage interns.
“I always like the best parties
and this is going to be the best
party,” Foley declared. Wearing
boot-cut jeans, cowboy boots, and
a grin, Foley bore little resemblance to the haggard, frowning
and ostensible heterosexual who
made national headlines six years
ago after messaging a high-school
lacrosse player saying he wanted
to grab his “big buldge” [sic].
With a quarter as many members as Log Cabin, GOProud
likens itself to a gay version of
the Tea Party, a band of selfdescribed rebels who share the
Tea Party’s hatred of big government and taxes. While Cooper,
the head of Log Cabin, is in many
ways the consummate GOP insider — a former bureaucrat in the
George W. Bush administration
who traces his family’s American
military legacy back to 1675 —
GOProud is led by a pair of Log
Cabin defectors who style themselves as the consummate outsiders, full of contempt for those
they call the proponents of the
“gay left agenda,” including their
former colleagues at Log Cabin.
Jimmy LaSalvia, a career activist
in his early 40s, and Christopher
R. Barron, 38, a lawyer, say they
founded GOProud because they
felt that Log Cabin was too liberal and that they could advance
gay rights by championing more
conservative policies.
Parse the distinctions between
Log Cabin and GOProud and you
not only parse political and social
fault lines around gay rights, you
straddle the divisions solidifying
among Republicans themselves
as the Grand Old Party tilts ever
more to the right.
GOProud’s leaders have little
interest in fighting for any of the
policies that gay rights activists have championed. While Log
Cabin tries to deliver Republican
votes to mostly Democratic social
legislation, GOProud dismisses
those efforts as futile and, well,
liberal. Yes, they support gay marriage, but they don’t consider it a
priority. They say the best thing
the government could do to promote gay equality would be to
adopt the “Fair Tax,” which would
eliminate all income and business
taxes and institute a sales tax of
either 23 or 30 percent, depending on how that tax is calculated.
The two groups also differ in
their stance towards the RomneyRyan ticket. By several accounts,