On the final night of the 2016 Republican National Convention, PayPal founder Peter Thiel (shown) announced, “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.” The announcement itself was no surprise, since Thiel is openly “gay.” If anything was surprising, it was the reaction by the ostensibly conservative crowd. Thiel received a standing ovation. The queering of the GOP is officially in full bloom.
Having fully accomplished the goal of wrapping the Democratic Party in the rainbow flag, the homosexual lobby is now well on its way to doing the same thing with the Republican Party. Homosexual groups — such as the Log Cabin Republicans and GOProud — have lived on the fringes of the party for years. After Thiel’s standing ovation, it appears they are no longer on the outside looking in; they are being embraced by a party that has increasingly lost its way.
Despite the fact that the GOP platform is still pro-family, Thiel sees no barrier to his pride in being a Republican. After all, a platform is just a piece of paper (or a few lines of HTML code on a website) that a great number of Republican politicians in recent years have had no qualms about ignoring. Thiel — building upon the growing distance between the party platform and the actions of many within the party — made it clear in his speech that he is unencumbered by the portions of the platform that address moral issues. In his speech, he said, “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform,” adding, “But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.”
What “fake culture wars” was Thiel addressing? He made it clear and his homosexual activist nature — already demonstrated by his company’s actions in suspending accounts of pro-family groups and abandoning plans to build a large operation in North Carolina after the state legislature voted to remove government almost entirely from the transgender bathroom issue — came through in all its rainbow brightness:
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.
This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
So, according to Thiel, moral issues are part of “fake culture wars” which “distract us” from the real issue of economics. As if the two concerns are mutually exclusive. It would be of little note that a homosexual millionaire made these statements. The importance of his statements is the crowd’s — and the GOP’s candidates’ — enthusiastic applauding of it.
And there is the rub. The American voter at least once had a choice in the ballot box about these issues. The Democratic candidate would be on one side of a moral issue and the Republican candidate would — at least in rhetoric — be on the other side. Now, it appears, the veneer is being removed. If the culture wars regarding moral issues such as abortion, drugs, and gay “marriage” stop mattering to Republicans, they will certainly not stop mattering to Democrats; if the “Right” abandons the field on these — and other — moral issues, the victory of “Left” in the culture wars is a foregone conclusion.
To clear the air a little here, moral issues are usually not federal issues. The federal government’s role is narrowly defined and its powers clearly enumerated and any action outside those parameters is out of bounds. But that does not mean that state legislatures are removed from these moral issues. Quite the opposite; the state legislatures have both the power and the responsibility to address these issues.
What needs to happen on the federal front is for the president, Congress, and the courts to back off and let the states decide these issues. But when the GOP National Convention invites a homosexual activist to deliver a subversive speech describing moral issues as “fake culture wars” while endorsing a candidate who shares that view and the crowd stands and applauds, it is a clear indicator that the GOP, at least at the national level, has no intention of the federal government leaving these issues to the states. As the Grand Old Party transforms into the Gay Old Party, federal encroachment will likely only increase as both parties compete in a race to the moral bottom.
After boasting:
I am proud to be gay.
I am proud to be a Republican.
But most of all I am proud to be an American.
I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline,
Thiel ended his speech by saying,
And nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.
While it is fitting to talk about who we are, today it’s even more important to remember where we came from. For me that is Cleveland, and the bright future it promised.
When Donald Trump asks us to Make America Great Again, he’s not suggesting a return to the past. He’s running to lead us back to that bright future.
Tonight I urge all of my fellow Americans to stand up and vote for Donald Trump.
What Thiel, the GOP, and Donald Trump need to realize is that no nation can be great if it is not first morally good. If the decline in morality of American life has not taught us anything else, it should have taught us that. And if that decline continues, America will not be great; it will continue to collapse.
Photo of Peter Thiel: AP Images
