ACTUAL REPORTING AT INSTAPUNDIT: Yeah, it happens now and then. I finally managed to speak with Tom Boyer of the San Francisco area Pink Pistols, who was at the NRA Convention, though he didn’t actually attend the speeches reported in this PlanetOut article by Steve Friess. But, he said, “I think it [the article] was probably accurate.” Boyer said that Friess was unfamiliar with the Rosie O’Donnell / Tom Selleck on-air confrontation over gun control, and probably just couldn’t grasp the depth of hostility against O’Donnell among gun owners, which has more to do with her position on gun control than anything else. He also said that “in my own experience with the NRA I’ve had nothing but support,” and that many NRA officials had offered to help the Pink Pistols in any way they can.
On the other hand, Boyer said that there were homophobic remarks made by individual members around Friess that Friess didn’t report, because he didn’t think it was fair to saddle the organization with the views of a few random members out of the 40,000 attending — but that speeches are a different matter. He’s right about this and — subject to the fact that one of the speakers, Debbie Schlussel, has denied that she said anything anti-gay — the remarks are a real problem for the organization.
As far as I’m concerned, no organization ought to have speakers making nasty anti-gay remarks at its annual meeting, and the NRA needs to get the word out to its speakers. Those who want to make such remarks should be invited to go elsewhere, and those who honestly don’t realize that certain remarks are offensive need to learn a bit more. Boyer says that he thinks the NRA is responding to this pretty well, and is trying to address this sort of thing in the future. They’d better, because the NRA has a big enough image problem as it is, and a lot of gun-rights supporters are libertarian types who have no sympathy for anti-gay slurs — or simply people with good manners who have no sympathy for slurs of that sort anyway. (On the other hand, though I’m okay with gay marriage and gay adoption, I think that opposing those isn’t, in itself, a “slur” — but it’s not really part of the NRA’s mission either, now is it?)
My conversation with Boyer, which ran over a half an hour, gave me a pretty nuanced view of an organization trying to deal with a real culture clash (or maybe mutual cultural ignorance would be a better description), with mixed results. It’s a lot more nuanced view than I got from Friess’s report, but of course he didn’t have half an hour, he had something like 800 words. I hope that the NRA leadership will have a lot of similar conversations in the near future.
UPDATE: A reader says that Grover Norquist is big on getting gays involved in the Republican Party, and suggests that his remarks contrasting “Gay Pride” parades with the absence of “Gun Pride” parades were probably meant to hold the former up as a positive example to emulate.