Reflections of a former gay teabagger

Back towards the end of 2007 I joined part of a new fresh grass roots movement called the "Tea Party." Its premise was simple: we want less government in our lives, less squandering of our tax dollars, more freedom, personal liberty, privacy, protection of civil liberties, and a more responsible government By The People, for The People.

That was all good and dandy. I got to meet a lot of good, well known people like Jesse Ventura (a gay rights supporter and former governor) Ron Paul (who voted for DADT repeal and is against the federal marriage amendment), David Icke (gay rights supporter, author, and former leader of UK Greens), Alex Jones (libertarian radio host who hates bible-thumping gay bashers), Micheal Badnarik (Libertarian politician, supports gay marriage as a matter of liberty) Bob Barr (the former congressman who actually authored DOMA and now advocates for its repeal and the legalization of gay marriage federally). These men are not by any means the classy definition anti-gay bigots who want public policy to reflect their prejudices and oppression against gays.

Contrast to popular belief The Tea Party was not founded by the Republican Party but it was rather sadly taken over by the GOP thanks to the help of some few anti-gay zealots of the religious right.

For many years now, the religious right had been marginalized from mainstream politics for a good reason: for its politics of hatred and division. The religious right focuses on people's differences rather than what unites us as a country. And gay pride is, at least to me, an American value we can all sympathize with. Gay pride to me means clamoring for freedom and liberty and fighting unjust government tyranny of a misguided majority, and since teabbagers are a minority one would think that they would sympathize. The religious right does not want, nor can it afford to, let gay rights, or for that matter, gay people be embraced anywhere else but the fringe left. They do not want Americans to see gays as just regular people, but rather as socialists, left wing extremists bent on destroying religious liberty and the family, even though many gays are religious and want to start their own families.

The religious right moved in quite quickly to move The Tea Party to the extreme right and co-opted it to mean something else in order to help peddle its anti-freedom agenda. Soon by 2009 many new people were joining in, this time with different agendas. Instead of bashing the political hierarchy of the two party system, they began to bash only democrats and the left while venerating the right wing and the Republican Party.

I remember at a rally when I was suppose to speak, a speaker before me requested that I not speak in fear that his church would assume that he "supported the perversion of homosexuality, I need that pervert to move" (his exact words). I was going to speak on the importance of unity and liberty for all, but of course, religious right politics had to come into play and when I heard about it I simply decided not to speak and instead left the rally.

In 2010 I became really discontent as more and more establishment and anti-gay wingnuts started to flood the gates of our new movement. Homophobia became the norm, and the bashing of gays in some Tea Party rallies was well accepted. After most of my friends stop going to Tea Party rallies I became very isolated in a sea of anti-gay sentiment. I thought that our movement would grow from independents, liberals and some conservatives, but it became apparent that normal people were not at all attracted to our movement anymore.

Catholic policies soon became to penetrate the voices of Tea Party rallies. Calls for liberty became calls for redemption from our sins. Calls for freedom became calls for stopping abortion, which I think has nothing to do with real issues affecting us today. By the end there were people at podiums talking about women's vaginas, fertilization, homosexuals in the military trying to rape soldiers, God coming down and destroying us for our failings among other rants that I think properly belong in a Fred Phelps sermon. It wasn't very long that I turned in my badge, and my "don't tread on me" shirt and simply walked away in 2010. I stopped answering emails, calls, and texts. I was sick both mentally and physically knowing that a movement of peace became a vehicle for wackadoodles and quacks who ponder the most grotesque things like blaming Nazism and the holocaust on gays. There was one event where an "ex-gay" was headlining a rally and even talked about how he was "liberated from sin."

So when I heard that Scott Lively attended a Tea Party rally over the weekend and was allowed to speak freely about the evil gays at the podium to which also another speaker called gays "faggots" for trying to protest Lively's appearance (even though a Tea Party is a protest in of itself which used to cherish freedom of assembly). Maybe many Tea Partiers don't get it. Maybe that's because this is not the Tea Party but the Religious Right in another name.

Scott Lively's calls for government intrusion in our bedrooms and personal lives in the form of the "kill the gays bill" in Uganda for which he is pushing for is by far the most draconian, anti-liberty, anti-American, anti-Tea Party thing to do. The Tea Party was all in a uproar over Obamacare's "individual mandate" which demands that people buy a health product (health insurance) because it infringe on people's privacy, personal choice, liberty, and economic freedom - plus the government cannot simply command you to do something that you do not want do, these are the arguments they propose. Yet they have accepted and embraced a man who believes that government has right to do all those things, especially to a group of people the majority despises, like gays. If the Tea Party adopts that logic then we would have all the reason to ban teabagging since the majority of people in this country now despises the Tea Party and has shrunk to a small minority of the Republican base.

One thing is for certain, even though I still believe in many of the things I mentioned in the beginning, the now rightfully labeled Teabaggers are not the answer. What we need is not just another grass roots movement or a special group of misguided right wingers to fix our problems, but an advancement of ideas rather than an advancement of one group with a draconian outlook on society. American society is hopeful, optimistic and trying to at least catch up with everybody else with regards to gay equality. Teabaggers are not any of these today, but rather stingy, angry, pessimistic, reclusive, prejudiced, and yes homophobic.

The teabaggers are no longer the fresh start of new ideas but rather a bastion to good old fashion hate mongering and sunshine silliness and, may I add, a mistake.