Nice shirt! Why were you so fucking silent on gay rights during campaign season?

I know I'm supposed to be happy that Meghan McCain is a Republican who loves the gays, but I couldn't care less—she's still a Republican. My interest in politics, unlike that of I would bet a good number of other gay people, does not begin and end at gay issues.

Even if they did, McCain is acting like speaking out now that her father lost handily to Barack Obama means she is somehow brave or honest or real. Hardly! She was palling around with pop-cultural terrorists Speidi during the election, not publicly demanding that her father protest the horrendous wording regarding gay issues in the Republican platform.

If her father had won, only an idiot would believe that Meghan would have turned into a Patti Davis thorn-in-the-side, hounding him about Don't Ask, Don't Tell, DOMA and other gay-rights issues. Hardly. She would have been posing for fashion magazines and hosting parties.

She wears a "Silence = Death" tee for Out, but for McCain, her silence during the prickly campaign was golden. It was a strategic silence similar to Obama's silence now, for which she's laughably castigating him.

Sure, she's entertainingly useful in her ability to rile up the right by denouncing Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and now Joe the Plumber ("a dumbass"), but she has yet to explain what makes her a Republican when that party for at least the past decade has been completely, inextricably defined by the religious right. She favors fiscal conservatism and a strong defense? So do many if not most Democrats. Even President Obama, who is spending lots of money we don't have these days, has pledged to have all of his spending pay for itself within his term, and of course the last Democrat to live in the house her father had wanted to inhabit left us with a rosy economy and surplus.

I don't care of Meghan McCain voted for John Kerry, and as fun as it is to read her outing her mother as a proponent of marriage equality—until she can explain what it is she opposes about being a Democrat that is so much worse than all the myriad of complaints she has about being a Republican, she's as much of a bullshitter as her crooked father.

Sidenote: But I applaud Out for featuring her; she's news. Just like I applaud The Advocate for featuring Perez Hilton on the cover; he's news. It appalls me that (well-intentioned) people who were against that argued that he isn't a good representation of our community. Who the fuck gets to decide that? Probably the same people who thought Lance Black was the ideal representative and got their noses out of joint when it turned out he fucked around bareback with a pornstar and took pictures of it. You know what? That didn't denigrate his integrity as a spokesperson one bit. Are we trying to win rights for all of us or just trying to trick our way into earning straight society's tolerance?