From Bob Roehr’s 11/20 Bay Area Reporter story on Log Cabin Prez Patrick Sammon’s departure:
[Sammon] sees an encouraging sign in that the governor of South Carolina is talking about how the party’s position on gay issues is driving young voters away.
Umm… Did Sammon completely miss that whole “South Carolina is so gay” debacle over the summer, or is he just ignoring the facts?
Gov. Mark Sanford is pro-gay, even moderately so? Only in our dreams.
When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford learned that his state was being advertised as a gay tourism destination, he ordered a Cabinet-level department head “to do the right thing personnel-wise or process-wise to ensure this does not happen again,” Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer told Q-Notes.
[..snip..]
In the Governor’s office, Sawyer said that the state will not promote itself as a tourist destination through campaigns “aimed at a specific group of people.”
Sawyer said the “so gay” ad should have been “run up the flagpole,” but did not know whether any standard procedures were violated at the time it was approved.
“It defies common sense that someone would sign off on an advertising campaign that controversial,” Sawyer said.
Asked whether South Carolina would, for example, position itself as a tourist destination for African-Americans by utilizing black media and promoting vacation spots of relevant cultural interest, Sawyer said that the state does not “get into targeting a specific group that might have a social or political agenda.”
NAACP, the leading U.S. African-American advocacy organization, is working to boycott South Carolina tourism due to the state’s official display of the Confederate flag.
“We don’t believe that the average South Carolina taxpayer would agree” with advertising the state as a gay tourist destination, Sawyer concluded.
Governor Sanford mandated that PRT director Chad Prosser will from now on have to personally sign off on all advertising campaigns, Sawyer said.
Sanford’s just eying a future career in some place other than the Palm(I’m-looking-backward)etto State. He’s figured out he’s got to play nice in a political world quickly changing right before his very eyes. His “gay friendly” nature doesn’t really come all that naturally, but I guess in the interest of career development he’s willing to give it a go.
November 21st, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Matt, my friend, of such small things are progress made… and remember the different contexts of these two statements.
One was made largely to a local audience - and you can’t tell me that most of South Carolina would be particularly pleased with being described as “so gay.” If they were fine with that to the extent that a conservative politician could back it, we wouldn’t have to be having this conversation. Sanford now is talking about the future of the GOP as a national party, and he’s saying that being perceived as antigay is a bad thing.
That’s nothing but good for us - especially given the other half of the context equation, which is that last summer was before an election, and now, it’s after an election where the GOP got our hats handed to us. Many Republicans are recognizing that something has to change - and if in that environment we’re hearing things that are, at minimum, encouraging less anti-gay behavior from my party, that’s something we should support.
Reward small steps in the right direction, and you encourage more. Attack somebody for being too late to change, or changing too slowly, and they’ll go right back to what they know and are comfortable with, and we’ll have missed an opportunity. This is how dialogue works, and it’s working today. Choose to be happy about it - it’ll give you less heartburn, and get us farther as a movement.