Ugh!! .... (0.00 / 0)

Kirchick is as clueless as Ross Douthat .. and I think the validity of that poll can be questioned .. why would they vote for a Party that wants nothing to do with them(besides some GOP'ers we all know)?

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by: Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 00:55:22 AM UTC

Oy (0.00 / 0)

Leave it to Andrew Sullivan to make Maggie Gallagher seem sensible.

And leave it to Kirhick to use a piece about the alleged conservatism of gays to accuse Andrew Sullivan of anti-semitism.  

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by: david mizner @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 01:15:28 AM UTC

The argument of his is clueless. (0.00 / 0)

While it's conventional wisdom that there are a lot of closeted gay Republicans, I don't see why there couldn't also be a lot of closeted Democrats. It depends on where they live, workplace, etc. as well.

If he contends that closeted gays and lesbians, are closeted because they are not proud of who they are, and there for hate themselves, or something, and there fore Republican or something.

All in all its an odd, very odd world view.

Its a lot easier to think of closeted gays and lesbians as living in occupied land. Think indeed of partisans, or the resistance. Being closeted doesn't mean approval, on the contrary, it means secret opposition. Closeted people, of whatever stripe live in fear of discovery, discovery by people who can cause damage. Even put you on trains.

It is more likely that closeted people are democrats, waiting for the liberation, for the occupying army to be disarmed.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

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by: HousesofProgress @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 01:58:11 AM UTC

To me it seems the opposite. (0.00 / 0)

Maybe it's a difference of where you live (I live in a red state) but it seems like 80% of the conservatives I know, (and 99.9%) of evangelicals, are actually closeted gays.

Montani semper liberi

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by: Sadie Baker @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 11:27:22 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Here's the basic premise (0.00 / 0)

Kirchick is basically saying that, assuming a gay Republican voter is more likely to be closeted and less likely to admit sexual orientation to a pollster than a gay Democratic voter, then any poll is going to underestimate McCain's support among gays, whether that poll says 27% or 7%.

If you think that a gay Republican is more likely to be immersed in social and economic groups that tilt Republicans and so is more likely to remain closeted in the face of a greater likelihood of hostile reaction, then Kirchick's assumption makes some intuitive sense.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 14:10:01 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

If you're closeted... (4.00 / 1)

 ...you're probably MORE acutely aware of which party wants to mess up your life.

 Then again, a large proportion of self-hating gays ARE Republicans. (Well, just about every Republican is a self-hating something.)

 

"We judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their actions. It is a great convenience." -- Howard Zinn

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by: Master Jack @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 02:28:15 AM UTC

This is anecdotal (4.00 / 1)

but I observed it in so many different settings with so many gay men that I think there's something to it.  

Regardless of race, status, class, etc., gay guys loved Hillary Clinton and talked about Obama with real vitriol as an unfit pretender to the throne.  I realize that I'm pressing hard on skimpy evidence, but it seems possible that lingering resentment over the primary depressed turnout among self-identifying gays.  

Far more important than such a dubious claim or Kirchick's own clumsy speculation is that the political payoff for the continuing GOP demonization of gays so grossly outweighs any possible advantage from appealing to them that speculation of a broad shift in gay political preferences is premature by more than a few decades.    

Moreover, the CNN poll screams "outlier."  I'm very skeptical that 27% of self-identifying gays voted for what was widely understood in terms highly relevant to gay politics for a third Bush term.  

Kirchick's piece as a whole, beginning with the "evidence" that serves as its central premise, seems totally silly.    

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by: wobbly @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 03:04:00 AM UTC

Has anyone considered the possibility that... (0.00 / 0)

...some of these respondents are old enough to think that "gay" still just means "happy?"

I probably have better things to do with my time than this.

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by: julie @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 08:59:43 AM UTC

stats like this always have their problems (4.00 / 1)

i examined some for the oft-repeated argument about black voters and Prop 8 in California and found they were, well, at best a short cut that missed enormously important details of the story and at worst either evidence of institutional racism or pure stupidity.  (e.g. you can make an argument, not a strong one, but an argument, that White voters supported banning adoptions by lgbt couples in arkansas based on the same kind of analysis).

Unfortunately, without an exit poll of LGBT voters that breaks them down in a way that helps us understand them (income, wealth, race, sex, first language, gender, sexuality, gender identity, year of entry or birth in the united states, and more), we would have a hard time interpreting any of these results in any way that goes beyond speculation - unless you can come up wtih a clever way to do so that is beyond me right now.

my personal experiences and the comments have others lead me to think that a) racism within the LGBT community; b) disaffection wtih the loss of Hillary Clinton; c) a confused identification of Democrat=working class + classism in the LGBT community were the major factors in some combination; d) the libertarian strain that runs through, at least, many LGBT men, and which may run through the community as a whole for multiple reasons including the dominence of men, might have led people to turn away from that.

But that's, at best, a guess.  Perhaps we could come up with a new crowdsourced research model to generate our own statistics based on comparative accounts or better yet providing our own voting details and information.  Anyone have time for an undergraduate or masters thesis? :)

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by: dr anonymous @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 10:24:48 AM UTC

oops forgot to include the link (0.00 / 0)

here's the post i did on race / prop 8 debate on why this kind of math-media is minimally effective at best and downright offensive at worst to social scientists/students/dilettantes...AND to the group of people that is being discussed.

http://www.passtheroti.com/pos...

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by: dr anonymous @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 10:28:55 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

For those who want to criticize the exit poll (0.00 / 0)

Here is the actual poll.

At a minimum, I would say that the criticism that the exit polling is only in certain states is probably false.  I don't see the methodology listed, but I would guess that the individual state numbers don't add up to the national polling numbers because they asked a certain set of questions of everyone and asked additional questions of only a subset of their sample.  Given that they had 4% of their sample identify as gay/lesbian/bisexual, they probably have about 700 such respondents in their 17K sample size.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Thu Apr 15, 2010 at 14:02:12 PM UTC