Jimmy LaSalvia - No Hope: Why I Left the GOP (and You Should Too)

Copyright 2015 by Jimmy LaSalvia

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Cover photograph by: Paul Morigi

ISBN: 978-1-5107-0238-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0239-4

Printed in the United States of America

For my friend Chris Barron,
with much love and gratitude for traveling along part of this political journey with me.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A fter spending most of my life and professional career as a conservative activist and openly gay Republican strategist, working in the trenches of the culture wars, I decided to leave the Republican Party. I made a public statement when I made that decision in 2014, and my announcement received a lot of media attention. Many of my friends from all those years in politics reached out to me when they saw those news stories on MSNBC, The Daily Beast, Politico, Time.com, ABC NewsYahoo News, and others to tell me that they didnt blame me for leaving the party. They knew all that I had been through in my efforts to help the GOP. Some of them even told me that they were considering leaving the Republican Party too.

This book is for them, and for all of the Republicans across the country who are thinking about leaving the GOP. Its also for all of those Americans who are tired of compromising themselves to conform to one side or the other in our broken two-party political system. I know that many people will relate to my story, and many more will be surprised at the lengths I was willing to go to help my political party of choice. They will come to realize, as I have, that there is just no hope that things will ever get better in the Republican Party. Its better to leave it rather than to participate in an untenable coalition or to prop up a broken institution. In real-estate terms, the GOP is a teardown. I came to realize that my efforts to help make our country better would be more effective working outside of the two-party system.

My story takes place at the intersection of culture and politics. My experiences deal with the most prominent cultural issues in politics in recent history: the issues relating to our innate human trait of sexual orientation. Issues affecting those of us who happen to be gay have been at the forefront of our national and worldwide political dialogue for the last forty years, especially in more recent years. Many in the conservative movement and the Republican Party have sought to use the force of government to halt cultural evolution in this area. I was at the center of the debate on those issues within the Republican Party for more than a decade, and I eventually determined that the GOP is culturally out of touch.

Culture is much bigger than politics. Its the essence of who we are and how we live our lives. Political issues that result when culture and politics intersect are different than other issues that we deal with in politics. Cultural issues are very, very different from things such as tax policy, or banking regulations, or trade, which are analytical in nature. Cultural issues deal with who we are and how we live, so they are very personal and carry a heavy emotional component with them. I often say that all politics is personal, but thats especially true with some issues more than others.

Culture changes and evolves over time. Those changes and that evolution result from experiences that we all share. Culture is also influenced by those different experiences unique to people who are like us, whether its because of our national origin, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or other characteristics that make up who we are. Those unique experiences give us a point of view that may be different from others. Modern life in America today includes people with many different points of view from many cultural backgrounds. Today in America, our shared cultural evolution recognizes our modern multicultural world and embraces it.

There is, however, a portion of America, mostly conservative Republicans, who resist participating in that shared cultural evolution. Thats evident when issues relating to things such as race, gender, and sexual orientation are debated. This group wants to bring America back to a time when straight, white, Christian men dominated our culture, instead of modernizing and embracing new multicultural realities. These new realities include the fact that white people will be a minority in America by 2040.

I have a right-of-center perspective, but Ive never thought that holding conservative principles and values meant that I had to live in the past. Ive always tried to apply my principles and values to modern problems, while recognizing the reality that culture changes and evolves. I spent my career trying to help the Republican Party to evolve and become a modern party that is in touch with real life in America today, because I thought it was important to have a competitive right-of-center party in our closed two-party system. Real life in America today includes gay people, living their lives openly and honestly. America today also includes more diverse points of view than ever before, and all of those viewpoints should be represented in the political arena.

While my experiences dealt most directly with the issues relating to gay people in the Republican Party, I saw firsthand the way many other positions based in the past are holding the party back, too. Frankly, the partys handling of homosexuality alone renders it unacceptable in todays America, but the issue of sexual orientation is just the biggest example of a much broader problem. There are many examples on a variety of topics that show that the cultural disconnect on the right is just too severe to overcome.

There are big things, such as the way Republicans have talked about and dealt with the immigration crisis, birth control, and other big issues that easily demonstrate that there is a segment of the GOP who refuse to accept modern American life. My unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on some of the most prominent examples of the GOPs cultural disconnect has helped to amplify those small examples to me when I see them. As the cofounder of the prominent national organization for gay conservatives and their allies, GOProud, I worked with some of the biggest players in the conservative movement and Republican Party to help to build a coalition that included everybody, including gay people. I learned, firsthand, what they think and why they make the decisions they make.

I decided to write this book about my experiences and observations inside the conservative movement and Republican Party to demonstrate to all of those good people who think that the GOP is a viable option for them, that its not. For all of those culturally modern people who think that they can change the party and help it to be more connected to our modern multicultural reality: theres no hope. Take it from me.