I more or less sympathize (though not exactly relate) with this gay Republican, even if basically anyone in public life will be able to portray a victim stature and we get that with such people as this politician (what is the equivalent term for “Uncle Tom” a gay population may blast him as?), but then things get warbled round about here:

“Stonewall was not about shoving into the face of society the agenda of same-sex relationships,” he said in a recent interview with National Review, referring to the riots that are often considered the start of the gay-rights movement in America. “It was, ‘Accept me and leave me alone and let me be free.’ And that’s how we should do it.”

That is debatable. It seems to me. It had as much to do with not viewing everything and the very existence as an act of shoving it in the face as, with many participants therein — and here it was the “unrespectables” jumping in the foreground past the “respectables” — who were content to proceed with the ritual dog and pony show that were these busts and disperse — the “unrespectables” stay by wanting to shove it in their face. Dissect the phrase “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it” at one’s leisure. Though there does appear to be some retroactive mythologing to fit approved radical narratives — there’s some activist the transgendereds claim who simply wasn’t.

The next problem with this politician comes in staring at the Texas Republicans’ platform — if we think we have modulated to a point where one can comfortably jump over to a new right side of the culture wars one where you throw out a giant raspberry at kvetching at the underperformance of the new Buzz Lightyear movie, or nod in understanding at the drag queen commentator (a minor celebre for the “right”) who asks the question “What is your obsession with having us read storybooks to your kids?” — the Texas Republicans jump in to remind us the spirit of Roy Moore lurks and looms.

The genius of Donald Trump was always that, quote – in – quote “Trumpism” fits both these sectors and segments of “anti-wokism”. Trump being, after all you know, the first President coming into office favoring gay marriage. And the man who may help facilitate the overthrow of Obergefel — and there I can only state that the politics of that differ from the politics of Roe — unless, I guess, the window breakers of various ” pregnancy crisis centers” and disruptors of Catholic masses (Note the headline at The Nation — “People who have abortions versus The Police. It’s time to pick a side“. A hoary rhetorical split to be sure.) have their way in an alignment of sorts with the Texas Republican party and Clarence Thomas.

I am a little bit surprised that this National Review article doesn’t dip into the problem of the rehabilitation of Romney to fit a narrative on posts Trump horror — they click this New Yorker segment and fail to point out what was happening with Romney’s candidacy —

Republican leaders have made a calculated choice in recent decades. As their reliable cadre of white voters shrank, they realized that they could either try to attract more minorities or try to motivate white citizens who rarely voted by tapping their racial insecurities. When Romney ran, he rejected the latter strategy, Stevens told me. Then came Trump, who embraced it and won. “The G.O.P. has become a white-grievance party,” Stevens said. DeSantis, he believes, is following the Trump playbook.

Romney’s immigration policy and rhetoric … promising that “self deport”ion. We have retrofitting happening here regarding Romney’s actual strategy and policy advocacy. Seemingly just because his next political act is to impeach the bastard. Or because of the Republican postmortem that came after the damned election — not before it.

The Washington Post has an editorial weighing in on Lightyear, which I cannot quite wrap my head around:

Lightyear,” Pixar’s latest attempt to frack its “Toy Story” franchise for profit, is not a very good movie. But it is a useful barometer of the current conservative backlash against LGBTQ rights. If people are truly angered by the lesbian relationship depicted in “Lightyear,” then maybe what seemed like a huge leap into a more tolerant future was just a moment of calm in an ongoing, and intensifying, culture war.

So the logical trajectory of this opinion is something like — (1) This movie sucks, (2) but because you watch a lot of movies that suck in the ways this one does and make them box office successes and get corporations lots of money, that (3) since you are not watching this sucky movie with some LGBT sub or over text in it, you are a bigot. I think that is what Alyssa Rosenberg is saying? More or less?

And the culture war swirls onward and upward.

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