Coming out as conservative in 2017 is becoming increasingly more difficult than coming out as gay.
Chadwick Moore, a contributor to the popular liberal gay and lesbian publication Out Magazine, penned an op-ed in the New York Post about how the aftermath of interviewing Milo Yiannopoulos turned him conservative.
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Moore received a chorus of hate mail and Twitter notifications calling him a “Nazi” and “Islamophobe” for writing a “neutral” interview of Milo.
“Personal friends of mine — men in their 60s who had been my longtime mentors — were coming at me,” Moore wrote. “They wrote on Facebook that the story was ‘irresponsible’ and ‘dangerous.’ A dozen or so people unfriended me. A petition was circulated online, condemning the magazine and my article. All I had done was write a balanced story on an outspoken Trump supporter for a liberal, gay magazine, and now I was being attacked. I felt alienated and frightened.”
He was eventually ostracized by his friends, many in the gay community, and the bar he frequented.
“I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was outside of the liberal bubble and looking in. What I saw was ugly, lock step, incurious and mean-spirited,” Moore continued.
It was after this realization that his politics didn’t fit in with the “liberal status quo.”
“You must absolutely hate Trump, his supporters and everything they believe,” Moore realized. “If you dare not to protest or boycott Trump, you are a traitor. If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor. It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.”
It was from then on that Moore, who grew up in the Midwest and came out to his family at 15, would come out again, but as a conservative. He described the process as “weirdly exciting.”
“I’ve already told my family, and it’s brought me closer to my father. He’s a Republican and a farmer in Iowa, and for years we just didn’t have very much to talk about. But after Trump’s inauguration, we chatted for two hours, bonding over the ridiculousness of lefties. But we also got serious: He told me that he is proud of my writing, and I opened up about my personal life in a way I never had before to him.”
While it boggles many open-minded liberals to comprehend how a gay man can be conservative, perhaps they should open their minds a bit further. The vitriol that has been directed at anyone willing to give President Trump, his supporters, and conservatives, in general, a fair shake, only pushes them away from their cause.
If liberals don’t come to this realization that hysteria in politics isn’t a winning strategy, then they’ll never attain power again.
