By Adam Levine
Tuesday, January 09, 2018
I am not a sex offender. But a number of my friends no
longer have time to see me. Lifelong acquaintances now regard me with fear and
distrust. I have been unfriended en masse
on social media and excoriated by friends who deign to remain. And I have been
singly excluded from social gatherings when the rest of my family was invited.
No, I am not a sex offender. I am something even worse
than that. I am a Donald Trump supporter.
I was raised in a liberal Jewish family in Washington DC,
where my dad served as a Democratic congressman for Los Angeles. Accordingly, I
was indoctrinated with all of the correct values and views.
When I was seven, my dad took me on a celebrity-packed camping
trip to Death Valley as part of a campaign to protect California’s deserts.
Israel took center stage in family discussions. I attended a Quaker elementary
school, where I learned the black national anthem before I knew the “Star
Spangled Banner.” In high school art class, I even chose to focus on man’s
destruction of the environment. I came out to my family as gay at the ripe age
of 20, and they were duly overjoyed.
It was always a given that Republicans are bad people,
representative of that shameful sliver of our flawed society that values money
above the planet and think the world would be better off if everyone were a
straight, white male. At a minimum they are racist, misogynistic and
homophobic. Left to their own devices, they would exclude ethnic minorities
from everything, kick sinful gay offspring onto the streets, and pave our parks
over with oil derricks.
Of course, there are the less malicious Republicans, the
ones who have fallen victim to their gun-toting, Bible-thumping families and
sadly do not know any better than what they have been told. This type is not
entirely to blame for their ignorance; they just deserve our pity. These truths
are held by my family and our extended social and political networks to be
self-evident.
These Ideas Didn’t
Work Out Long-Term
When, in my adulthood, the liberal policy agenda became
problematic for me, I found myself at a loss. I began to raise questions with
my family and friends, and met resistance. It was not because my concerns were
particularly inappropriate; I was just not supposed to be questioning at all.
One could disagree with nuances, but not the judgment of
the (then) president, or the party. Period. The irony of this apparent
intolerance for diversity of thought by the party claiming to champion the
rights of groups underserved by the status
quo was not lost on me.
For the first time in my progressive life, standing up
for the values that I most strongly espouse—truth, morality, self-reliance,
boundaries, tolerance, and a healthy dose of Jewish skepticism—was damaging my
reputation and character. When I publicly opposed my dad’s support of the Iran
deal, I was admonished. I had few friends with whom I could have a civil
political conversation: one stopped all communication with me for two weeks
because Trump won the presidency.
If Republicans are bad, Trump is nothing less than Satan
embodied. Post-election family gatherings devolved into group Trump-bashing,
which intensified as more rumors of my dubious views wafted across town. I did
not even bother going to gay pride because it was fused with a Resist march. If
you do not want to impeach our president, you have no place in gay life.
I was labeled a white supremacist by a friend I’ve known
my entire life, and completely dropped with no explanation by another dear
friend and self-anointed giant of the gay civil rights movement to whom my
father had introduced me 15 years ago.
Your Platitudes
Don’t Work Out In Real Life
Yes, I was in despair, but I was also outraged at not
being understood for views that felt so plainly obvious to me logically and
experientially. These were not pie-in-the-sky views I was advocating in order
to provoke. The Affordable Care Act has made medical treatment of my bipolar
disorder more expensive than ever. Under the nuclear agreement, Iran flagrantly
continues to enrich uranium and fund terrorist activities.
As a small business owner, I am regularly assaulted with
financially crushing, nonsensical red tape and bureaucracy, much implemented as
lip service to environmental protection. With few exceptions, every one of my
good friends feels more economically hopeless after the “recovery” than before,
and abject homelessness on the streets of my beloved city has swelled to
egregious levels.
In desperation, like a closeted teenager sneaking into a
porn theater, I surreptitiously began to explore the forbidden territories of
Fox News and other conservative outlets. Incredibly, I found myself agreeing
more often than not.
Fine, I thought, but that is where I had to draw the
line. A couple of conservative encounters does not a conservative make, right?
Until more liberals began to recognize the disingenuousness and destructiveness
of my party’s stances, I just resolved to stick it out. I did everything in my
power to avoid that one last unspeakable, fatal option: turning Republican.
Harvey Weinstein
Was the Last Straw
Then Harvey Weinstein provided me the impetus I lacked:
the media outlets that had enabled and covered up his indiscretions for years
were the same major public voices for the
Democratic Party, the self-proclaimed party of worker’s and women’s rights.
The game was up; two and two could no longer be five. I reached my threshold
where no amount of hypothetical Republican bigotry or greed could approach the
magnitude of hypocrisy, corruption, or criminality I saw rotting the Democrats
to the core. I jumped ship.
I found out almost immediately that the Republican Party
is not only not evil, but populated with nice, intelligent, humble people. Days
after I added myself to the Log Cabin Republican mailing list, I saw an invite
to attend a gathering with Chadwick Moore, an independent journalist and one of
two lapsed gay Democrats I had heard of.
When Chadwick spoke, I was stunned: every sentence, every
nuance and anecdote of his beautifully articulate, moving talk resonated almost
identically with my own experience. From Chadwick and the dozens of other Log
Cabin attendees that night, I learned I am not the only gay person to question
Democrats or to be ostracized for doing so—by a longshot. The political climate
has made it prohibitive for most of us to have a voice and find each other.
Seeing virtue (or perhaps just a lack of evil) in my
compatriots finally allowed me to see it in myself. I am now certain that I can be a gay, Jewish Republican and still
be a good person and a useful citizen.
I Can Help People
Rather than Making Someone Else Do It
I can oppose spending on government programs with no
accountability and still volunteer my time at the mental health center to serve
underprivileged members of society. I can value work and responsibility but
also want a safety net for the sick and unemployed. I can fight for a strong
Israel and vastly diverge from the Obama doctrine (or the Trump doctrine). I
can be actively engaged in the LGBT community and not be forever outraged at a
baker.
It took 36 years for me to see through the Democratic
mystique of what the Republican Party is. Having done so has enabled me to
affirm a deep part of who I am, which runs deeper than religion or sexual
orientation, because it is part of what forms me. Sadly, it was a part that I should
not ever have had to question in the first place.
If the struggles of the LGBT and Jewish peoples have
taught me one thing, it is that I count, I matter, no more or less than any
other man—precisely not because of my
sexual preferences, or the God I worship, but because I am a citizen of planet
Earth. The knowledge there is a major political party that extends this creed
to its members has restored a deep-seated hope inside of me for my country’s
future.
My next hope is that one or two readers of this will not
struggle as hard to realize the same.
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