The Gay Republican group GOProud will host its Homocon 2010 convention in New York City on September 25. Headlining this bash will be none other than “the right-wing Judy Garland” and conservative author Ann Coulter.
“Our gays are more macho than their straights!” the event invitation declares, apparently comparing gay Republicans to straight Democrats.
“This will be a party that celebrates gay conservatives,” Christopher Barron, chairman of the GOProud board, told TPM. “The gay left has done their best to take all the fun out of politics, boycotting and protesting one thing after another. [Homocon] is our effort to counter that.”
Coulter seems to be an odd choice to headline the event. In the past, she’s gotten in trouble for dropping the gay equivalent of the f-bomb in public. She called 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards a “faggot” at the March 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C.: “I was going to have a few comments on the other presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.'”
At the time, Edwards fired back on his campaign website: “Ann Coulter’s use of an anti-gay slur yesterday was un-American and indefensible.”
The Log Cabin Republicans, another gay conservative organization, also denounced Coulter afterwards. “Coulter’s words are not worthy of this event or our nation’s political dialogue,” President Patrick Sammon said in a statement.
Coulter tried to clarify on Fox News: “‘Faggot’ isn’t offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays,” she explained. “It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss,’ and unless you’re telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person.”
The GOProud’s Barron accepts that. “She came out and said that she was not calling him gay,” he said. “She said it would have been an insult to gay people to call him gay.”
Liberals in this country want to view conservatives in a narrow prism, but we are a tolerant, accepting group. The fact that she’s doing an event for a traditional conservative group speaks volumes for how she feels about gay people.
Here’s the invitation:
