Black Gay Army Vet Comes Out As A Conservative

Kudos to Rob Smith for taking the leap and coming out.

Sure. He’s a black gay army Vet, but I’m not talking about “coming out” in the “traditional” sense. He’s coming out as a conservative. He said he’s sick and tired of the Democratic Party’s culture of outrage.

Rob Smith, author of a 2017 book about being a gay man in the military during the ‘don’t’ ask, don’t’ tell’ era, is a registered Democrat and was raised in a liberal working-class family in Ohio. But he said that over the past couple of years what he considers to be left-wing outrage culture has pushed him to become conservative.

Some of us are raised conservative. Others are pushed into it by the left. I was a combo of both. I was raised in a conservative household (we weren’t really political, but my parents operated their lives in a conservative, common sense way). Then I went to college, and it pushed me even FURTHER to the right. Leftist lunacy secured my beliefs. I dug my heels in.

He did not vote in the 2016 election but wants to buck what he said is a stereotype that African Americans and LGBTQ people are always liberal Democrats.

“For me, as a gay man and a black man, I have to… Somebody has to start the conversation, specifically with LGBTQ people, to say being a Democrat is not a sign of morality and being a Republican is not a sign of evil,” he said. “We can work on both sides to advance this idea of LGBTQ equality, we just have to figure out what that is.”

THANK YOU. I love how he articulated that point. Democrats wear their “D” as a sign of morality. If you’re a Democrat, you’re automatically a compassionate, loving, tolerant individual. Keep in mind that you don’t actually have to BE those things. You just are, because you have the letter next to your name.

Smith went on to say that he was partially inspired to “come out” by Kanye West. While he disagreed with his comments on slavery, he sees the cultural significance of what he did. He simply dared to step out of the box. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you have to be a Democrat.

“If you have somebody with that much power that has done that much for the culture and they can get torn down within days for saying that they support the President or for saying that they may not subscribe to what the Democratic Party has been telling black people that we need to think?” he asked. “And I just looked at this whole thing and I just said, well if it can happen to Kanye, it can happen to anybody. What am I supposed to be, afraid to have different ideas?”

“Those comments [on slavery] were terrible. They just don’t make any sense. And it was actually very right of a lot of people to denounce that,” he continued. “I think that it was very easy for people to hop on those comments and focus on those comments to completely discredit everything else that he had said before.”

You shouldn’t feel afraid to come out and stand up for what you believe. The color of your skin doesn’t obligate you to a political party. Did you hear me in the back, Democrats?

“Being a conservative and living in New York City can be a very isolating thing,” he said.

I bet.

“I mean, I just talked to my mother about it last week and she says she just doesn’t understand it. She literally said she’s going to come up to New York and kick my a**,” he said.

He’s even lost friends.

“They’ll tell me what they think I’m supposed to think or say or believe, just because of the color of my skin,” he said. “For white men, the idea is that whatever political decision they’ve come to was informed by whatever their individual thoughts, feelings and experiences are. And that’s fine… but when you take the white maleness out of the equation, we like to tell black people how they should think. We like to tell gay people how they should think. We like to tell women how they should think.”

There were several incidents over the past few years that influenced Smith’s switch to becoming conservative. He said he was ‘infuriated’ and ‘felt let down’ when in June 2016 LGBTQ leaders failed to condemn the Pulse nightclub attack as terror and instead they ‘couldn’t find anything better to do than to finger wag against Islamophobia and to indulge these conspiracy theories about what the terrorist attacker’s motivations were’.

He has also been frustrated by the way that LGBTQ youth have been taught to use ‘victimhood’ as a way to get more attention. As an LGBTQ activist who gives lectures on college campuses around the country, his message focuses instead on the strength of the students, not the ways they have been victimized.

Smith also said he was really influenced by Sen. Marco Rubio’s book, “American Dreams.”

“I had never read anything or even encountered a conservative that actually had real ideas about how to change some of these systems and still help people,” Smith said. “For me as a black person, these ideas of empowering and uplifting the black community, these ideas of fighting for LGBTQ rights, these are not ideas that need to be subscribed to any political party. These are ideas that exist within us. And these are ideas that I’m just not finding in the Democratic Party right now.”

It’s common sense stuff!

“You cannot have any of these conversations within the Democratic Party right now without poking the outrage bear, without people calling you a racist, without people telling me that I hate black people and I hate myself and I hate LGBT people and all of these things,” he continued.

“In order to adhere to [some] principles and believe in these principles, I have to believe in everything else and I don’t believe in everything else,” he added. “I do believe in strong borders, I do believe that we need to start having real conversations about the illegal immigration situation in this country. And when you say that, you are excommunicated. You are called a racist, you are called all sorts of different things that detract from ideas… I believe that we can have a conversation about illegal immigration that is not filled with hatred, but it has to be a real conversation and it can’t be a conversation that somebody shuts down just by saying racist.”

That’s the leftist playbook. This is what happens when you walk off the liberal thought plantation. Smith realizes that.

“We have said, as black people, for decades that we can be anything, that we can think anything, that we can do anything. And yet the people in power still want to keep us in this box of the Democratic Party. Just because I am black does not mean I have to be a Democrat and just because I am a black person who identifies as conservative does not mean that I am uninterested in any ideas that are intended to uplift the black community,” he said.

“It just means that for me, I think that Democrats’ ideas about how to uplift the community are outdated. They don’t make any sense and I think they serve to further a narrative of black people as poor [and] as victims,” he added.

BINGO.

You go Smith. You’re not alone, and you’re an inspiration to others who are sick of the Democratic Party telling them what they have to believe.

h/t Daily Mail