“Last night’s interview with Bruce Jenner by Diane Sawyer on ABC’s 20/20 turned out to be very revealing … in a much different way than many thought,” Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air. “By this time, a relentless series of media reports had made it quite clear that Jenner had embraced a transgender identity, at least privately. The big reveal turned out to be that Jenner also identifies as a conservative Republican:”
When Sawyer asked if Jenner cheered when Obama became the first president to even say the word “transgender” in a State of the Union address, the 65-year-old replied that he “would certainly give him credit for that.”
“But not to get political,” Jenner continued, “I’ve never been a big fan, I’m kind of more on the conservative side.”
“Are your a Republican?” Sawyer asked in response, to which Jenner replied, “Yeah! Is that a bad thing? I believe in the constitution.”
“Do you think that would be an unsettling thing for some people in the conservative wing of the party?” Sawyer asked.
“I’ve thought about that,” says Jenner, adding that neither political party has a monopoly on understanding.
“Tolerance? Not so much. Prior to the interview airing, progressives on Twitter offered lots of support for Jenner, and plenty of predictions about how conservatives would heap scorn on Jenner. After Jenner truly came out, their tone changed considerably, as Twitchy documented,” Ed adds.
Back in 2009, in the depths of “We Are All Socialists Now” chest-thumping triumphalism of the Obama administration and their media operatives, former liberal turned conservative author Harry Stein wrote a book titled I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, which documented the “tolerant” left’s reflexive knee-jerk freak out reaction when actually confronted by ideological diversity:
My favorite tale in this regard comes from a friend who lives in Park Slope. She reports creating level-red discomfort, when the talk on a recent evening turned to gay marriage. Everyone was for it, of course, including my friend. “But wouldn’t it bother you if your own children were gay?” she added, all innocent curiosity. “After all, isn’t it natural to want your kids to mirror your experience? To have a traditional marriage and raise children in the traditional way? I can’t think of anything that would make them more foreign.” She reports that, hearing this, the liberals around the table “got very flustered — because of course they feel exactly the same way. There was a long silence, and then someone said: ‘I would be much more upset if my kids were Republican,’ and that let everyone off the hook.
That same year, comedian Paul Rodriguez described a near identical experience:
I remember many years since, trying to contemplate the idea of joining the Grand Old Party, and I said I better run this through Mom. I said, “Ma, Dad, sit down, I want to talk to you.” Before I could go any further, they said, “Oh, my God, he’s gay. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) Ay, Dios mio, he’s gay.” I said, “No, no, no, Mom, I’m thinking of being a Republican.” She said, “I wish you were gay. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) Please look, what have we done?”
And right on cue:
If I could pick one tweet to symbolize the intolerance of the left, I might pick this one. pic.twitter.com/LdB01grg2P
— Ken Gardner (@kesgardner) April 25, 2015
Don’t ever change, reactionary leftists.
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