Al Cardenas has suggested that gay GOP
group GOProud's involvement in the Conservative Political Action
Conference (CPAC) may be at an end after GOProud Chairman Christopher
Barron took a swipe at one of its board members.
Cardenas is the new chairman of the
American Conservative Union (ACU), which annually organizes the
event.
GOProud's co-sponsorship of this
weekend's event in Washington prompted social conservatives to
boycott the event.
Several Republican lawmakers, including
South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and Ohio Representative Jim Jordan,
and a smattering of socially conservative groups – the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), FRC Action and Concerned Women for
America (CWA) – have joined the boycott.
In several media interviews, Barron
said the backers of the boycott were motivated not by policy
disagreements but rather hatred of gay and lesbian people, and called
Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican lawyer and a board member of
the ACU, a “nasty bigot.”
“I think there's a couple people in
Heritage who, at the behest of Cleta Mitchell – who is just a nasty
bigot … she got some of the people at Heritage early on fired up
about his,” Barron
told gay D.C. weekly Metro Weekly before
the conference doors opened. “It looks terrible for
them, and I didn't want to have them humiliate themselves. But
they've seemed hell-bent on it. Their story keeps changing and now
we're down to the truth, which is: It was about us. And they've lost
donors. They've lost supporters.”
In remarks to the conservative website
FrumForum.com, Cardenas chided the group.
“I have been disappointed with their
website and their quotes in the media, taunting organizations that
are respected in our movement and part of our movement, and that's
not acceptable. And that puts them in a difficult light in terms of
how I view things,” Cardenas said.
“It's going to be difficult to
continue the relationship [with GOProud] because of their behavior
and attitude,” he said.
Cardenas added that in his opinion a
“Ronald Reagan conservative” could not support gay marriage and
that among his priorities as the new ACU chairman will be “making
sure that our true friends never leave the table.”
Barron apologized for his remarks, but
not before defending himself: “For the past six months, we have
watched as unfair and untrue attacks have been leveled against our
organization, our allies, our friends and sometimes even their
families. Everyone has their breaking point and clearly in my
interview with Metro Weekly I had reached mine. I shouldn’t
have used the language that I did to describe Cleta Mitchell and for
that I apologize.”