Back in 1971, when I was on the faculty of the City College of New York, a group of us created an uproar on campus by sponsoring a lecture by Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, who had published a study which found absolutely no difference in mental stability between straight and gay males. If you had told me then that fifty years later marriage between two consenting adults, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, would be Constitutionally-protected in all 50 states, I would have thought you were out of your mind.

              For that matter, if you had come up to me while I was sitting in South Africa’s Joberg Airport in 1989 and told me that Nelson Mandela would soon be released from prison and that apartheid would then shortly collapse, I would have also thought you were out of your mind. But sometimes even the most unimaginable and wonderful things happen over the course of our lives.

              I thought back to the lecture by Evelyn Hooker yesterday when I learned that four GOP Presidential wannabees – Rubio, Lee, Braun, Hawley – sent a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding to know why Amazon was no longer selling When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a bookwhich claims that the decision to become a transgender person is symptomatic of mental disease.

              The response from Amazon was this: “we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Good for them.

              The media keeps talking about how the GOP is having problems framing an attack on Joe and Kammie, so instead, they are ramping up the culture ‘wars.’ They have been accusing the Democrats of something called ‘cancel culture,’ an accusation that really got rolling after Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump. You can see a list of right-wing noisemakers who have been the targets of cancel culture attacks from the Left.

              In my self-appointed task as someone who would like the GOP to be permanently reduced to a minority party, I happen to think that we should encourage Republican politicians and right-wing pundits to speak out against cancel culture as frequently and as loudly as they can. Here’s why.

              First, you have to be blind, stupid, or dumb not to realize that cancel culture is just a way for the GOP to quietly slither away from the ugly and disgusting racism of the Trump brand, but meanwhile pretend that Trump is still their man. And even though Amazon’s decision to decide what it will and won’t sell has absolutely nothing to do with free speech, you can always claim that being a Conservative means you defend the Constitution; it’s those radical Commies on the other side who want to tear our God-given freedoms down.

              The other reason I want the GOP to continue their cancel culture strategy is that I really can’t believe not only how quaint it sounds to be against gay rights, but it’s particularly going to take the Republicans off to never-never land while we are still trying to overcome Covid-19. If Joe gets a needle into the arm of every adult who isn’t afraid of being vaccinated by the beginning of June, do guys like Rubio and Hawley genuinely believe they’ll be able to score political points by reminding voters that they made a place on the shelves for all the books written by Dr. Seuss?

              Let me tell you something about the future of the GOP, in particular the attempt by guys like Hawley, Rubio, Cruz and the other 2024 wannabees to fasten their wagons to the alt-right. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, the Breitbart website was getting 70 million hits every thirty days. Since Joe’s inauguration, that number has fallen to 39 million, okay?

              Funny how the audience for all that right-wing crap has fallen by nearly half since cancel culture got Trump to shut the f*ck up.

              Hooray for cancel culture. Bring it on, I say, bring it on.