The dinosaurs keep saying, "Mammals. Hmph. Tasty enough, but no future."

Andrew Sullivan writes about making Forbes' list of influential liberals in the US today, and it's worth a read:

Below: the cover of the 2008 Republican National Convention Platform's Culture Wars Chapter

Broadly, [Forbes says] a "liberal' subscribes to some or all of the following: progressive income taxation; universal health care of some kind; opposition to the war in Iraq, and a certain queasiness about the war on terror; an instinctive preference for international diplomacy; the right to gay marriage; a woman's right to an abortion; environmentalism in some Kyoto Protocol-friendly form; and a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket.

After outlining his positions on those litmus test issues, Sullivan wonders:

None of these positions is in any way a mystery - every single one is in the public record multiple times. So why am I a liberal to these people, to someone smart and decent like Tunku Varadarajan? Why do I earn the prize of "most annoying liberal" out of countless others whose liberalism is avowed and long and uncomplicated, and none of whom supported Reagan and Thatcher and Bush in '88 and Dole and Bush in 2000? I mean: I'm more liberal than Michael Moore?

His response?

The answer, I think, is two-fold. The first is that I am openly and proudly gay - another fact that spans the last twenty years. Forbes writes the following:

His advocacy for gay marriage rights and his tendency to view virtually everything through a "gay" prism puts him at odds with many on the right.

I can see that my advocacy for marriage equality puts me at odds with Republican religious doctrine, even though, for example, I edited an anthology on the subject that took great pains to include many right-wing voices against marriage equality from Bill Bennett to Stanley Kurtz. I can see that being gay allows me a perspective sometimes not available to others. But how is my view of the Iraq war or torture or the environment or Obama or the debt or drug legalization viewed through a gay prism? Any reader of this blog or my Sunday column will instantly realize that this is absurd - "virtually everything" I write is put through a gay prism?

The real truth is that many on the Republican right just read everything I write through an anti-gay prism, because their homophobia - benign or not-so-benign, conscious or unconscious - is so overwhelming it occludes any genuine assessment of a person's thoughts outside this fact. See how Forbes cannot even keep the word gay out of quote marks. Just imagine the same sentence with the word "Jewish" replacing the word gay. It tells you everything you need to know about the moral core of conservatism today. It's sad and will one day be seen as embarrassing.

It's a lot like being a gay SC blogger when your views span a range of issues from right to left. Compare Forbes' comment about Sullivan-

His advocacy for gay marriage rights and his tendency to view virtually everything through a "gay" prism puts him at odds with many on the right.

- with The Palmetto Scoop's slagging of this blog:

The mere mention of homosexuals in a negative light is enough for this person to make someone an enemy for life.

The truth is, the "leading" (to borrow a usage from Forbes) conservative political bloggers in this state are just as Sullivan describes swathes of the GOP: "their homophobia - benign or not-so-benign, conscious or unconscious - is so overwhelming it occludes any genuine assessment of a person's thoughts outside this fact."

And Waldo concurs with Sullivan's assessment of things:

For the record: self-confident political groupings seek converts - look at Obama. Failed and failing political groupings seek to punish and list heretics. I'm resigned to being a heretic given the state of the current conservative movement. And as an independent writer, it mercifully can't hurt me much. I just don't think conservatism will revive until it stops thinking that way.