Former G.O.P. Congressman Aaron Schock Comes Out As Gay
A few days ago, former Republican Congressman Aaron Schock made a blog post confirming long held suspicious about his sexuality. He had a lot of critics who raised some fair points about his past stances and actions, but he was also the target a lot of unfair personal attacks on Twitter.
Aaron Schock is, like everyone else, a flawed person. Was it wrong for him to oppose gay marriage and other gay rights issues? Yes. Is it surprising that he would do so? Not at all. He acknowledges his misguided past positions while also offering a pill difficult for the left to swallow; a reminder that just a few years ago, they also weren’t terribly “woke” when it came to marriage equality.
No one gets to choose when we learn our lives’ big lessons. Mine have been no different. In 2008, as a Republican running in a conservative district, I took the same position on gay marriage held by my party’s nominee, John McCain. That position against marriage equality, though, was also then held by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as well.
That fact doesn’t make my then position any less wrong, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that it was leaders of both parties who for so long wrongly understood what it was to defend the right to marry.
His story is exemplary of the fear felt by many young men who remain closeted, and it demonstrates that while some people receive warm reception upon coming out, many do not. His personal journey was one hugely shaped by overbearing religion and regressive politics, and it shows just how difficult it is for young men to come out in environments where they’re raised to treat same sex attracted people as defective or morally deficient.
To characterize some of these conversations with my family in general, it’s fair to say it has not been a case of instant acceptance and understanding. What I had to share was unwelcome news to every single person in my family, out of the blue in some cases, and was met with sadness, disappointment, and unsympathetic citations to Scripture.
He is representative of a type of same sex attracted person who experiences even more intolerance than most, because not only was he rejected by many conservative and evangelical people close to him, but he is also actively being rejected by the political left who claims to be open and tolerant of everyone despite their background (except, it seems, when they don’t subscribe entirely to their political platform), and who have explicitly demonstrated in Schock’s case that they clearly aren’t above trying to out someone they believe to be closeted when it is politically expedient for them:
I was a single guy, and people would comment on how I dressed, and about my preoccupation with physical fitness. Untruthful stories were written. Even years into my time in Washington, I was still naïve enough to wonder why the news media would run with an utterly false story about me and a show I’d never even heard of, and still haven’t seen, Downton Abbey.
It took me a while to figure out that it was really just the media’s own way in which they got to say THAT about me in print…to tie me to a stereotype. In fact, if you want to learn something about the “woke” media, Google my name and consider how prominently that fabricated lie, still without even a single source to back it up, will feature in stories about me by people who otherwise call themselves journalists. It was another way, albeit more sophisticated, to be teased about being gay. A dog whistle.
Towards the end of the post, he again acknowledges his prior missteps, and also advocates for the right of gay men to maintain their own individual thoughts and belief systems, rather than adopting the one society tells them they’re supposed to take up upon coming out. If there’s one thing in this post that I hope gay men will take away from it, it’s this: that being gay doesn’t exclude you from being able to form your own set of opinions and beliefs.
The truth is that if I were in Congress today, I would support LGBTQ rights in every way I could. I realize that some of my political positions run very much counter to the mainstream of the LGBTQ movement, and I respect them for those differences. I hope people will allow for me the same.
To that end, I hope that others can respect that for me being gay has not required stepping into some entirely new belief system, disconnected from every other facet of my life’s experiences. I haven’t overcome one kind of repression for another.