David Paul Kuhn reported at the Politico last February that Republican National Committee strategists had begun holding focus groups to test the limits of racist and sexist tactics in the general election against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, depending upon who won the Democratic Party nomination for President. While Kuhn framed the studies as an attempt to avoid “going too far” it was pretty illustrative of the RNC’s ideology that they seemed willing to go right up to the edge, so long as they knew where that edge was. And really, the 527s will do all the dirty work.

As for the recent – and awesome – news that the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage, the fundie and homophobic backlash has already begun in the form of initiative drives to ban same-sex marriage in the California state constitution. Good luck to our queer friends and their allies in California in fending those bastards off. Fortunately, despite the joke of my cartoon up above, I don’t believe the GOP will get much mileage this election year out of gay-bashing. That doesn’t mean they won’t try, but it will be more difficult for McCain to seize upon the issue without alienating popular fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose support of gay marriage is more progressive than either of the two Democrats (props to Senator Clinton for being so gay-friendly in her campaigning, however.)

Tags: homophobia, racism, republicans, sexism

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under In Contempt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.