News & Opinion
Newt Gingrich: Gays Should 'Support Obama'
Forsaking all LGBT voters is the GOP presidential frontrunner's new strategy.
December 21 2011 12:29 PM EST
March 22 2016 12:36 AM EST
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Forsaking all LGBT voters is the GOP presidential frontrunner's new strategy.
A mere four days after Candace Gingrich-Jones told The Advocate that the entire pack of Republicans leading the 2012 presidential nomination race was "disappointing," her half-brother and GOP frontrunner, Newt, illustrated that point perfectly at a campaign event in Iowa.
"I asked him, if he's elected, how does he plan to engage gay American? How are we to support him?" Scott Arnold, a gay professor at William Penn University, told the Des Moines Register. "And he told me to support Obama. When you ask somebody a question and you expect them to support all Americans and have everyone's general interest, it's a little bit frustrating and disheartening when you're told to support the other side. That he doesn't need your support."
Obviously, Gingrinch (Merry X-Mas!) is not going to lose tons of LGBT followers with this revelation, since there probably aren't that many to begin with. But his response is that of pure disengagement--a strategy that many, if not all, prominent candidates in the Republican race have awkwardly tried to employ when it comes to gay issues (that, or just using words to create sentences that don't have any coherent meaning).
Is the GOP's 2012 election strategy, openly forsaking an entire segment of the population, really viable? There's definitely an elephant in the room--we just didn't realize it was us.
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