Good news for gay rights and fiscal sanity from CPAC

As Megan McArdle points out, the real news out of the whole Ryan Sorba controversy is that the audience booed him off the stage.  This is at CPAC, the gathering of beltway conservatives like Newt Gingrich, conservative college kids and activists, and tea partiers.  This is the same audience cheering on Glenn Beck – and they’re booing the homophobic Sorba off the stage.

That’s pretty astonishing if you ask me.  While Andrew and others lament how awful conservatives have gotten lately, I see quite the opposite.  Never before in the history of this country have gays and lesbians received such support from conservatives – and that support is growing at a pretty incredible pace. 

Republican Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, supports repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  So does Colin Powell.  So do numerous other conservative writers and politicians, though certainly not all of them.  It’s not surprising anymore at all to find conservatives writing in support of gay rights at major conservative publications.  There is a long way to go, but at the very least that’s the road we seem to be on, headed in the right direction.

For more on the Sorba scandal, see Alex Knepper.  Ryan Sorba, if you don’t know already, is the author of The Born Gay Hoax.  And he was, indeed, booed off stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.  This is big news – much bigger news than Ryan Sorba being a homophobe.

Here’s the video of Sorba’s tirade:

This is also good news:

Notice that only 1% of CPAC attendees polled chose “Stopping gay marriage” as their second choice.  Nobody picked it as their first choice.  Compare that with the combined 52% of respondents who answered that “Reducing the size of Federal Government” was a top priority, and you begin to see what Mark Thompson is driving at when he writes that “the future of the Right lies with the Tea Parties, and in particular with the more libertarian element of the Tea Parties.”

The other good news from CPAC is that Ron Paul won the 2012 presidential straw poll, with Mitt Romney as a close second.  Romney may be an empty suit, but he’s a far cry better than Palin – who only dredged up 7% of the vote.

And of course not all is well in contemporary conservatism. Mickey Edwards does a pretty good job pointing out why.  I still can’t reconcile myself with warfare conservatism – terror and torture dominate so much of the conservative chatter these days.  Perpetual warfare is inimical to limited government, as Larison notes:

It has never made much sense to me that there can be people who are furious with “big government” for excessive spending but who simultaneously have no problem vesting the same government with virtually limitless power to seize, detain, wiretap, attack and kill just about anyone it wants to target.

And so, for all the leaps and bounds we see at this year’s CPAC on fiscal and social attitudes, there is still the elephant in the room – big defense – which conservatives have yet to grapple with.  I still think the tea parties could be instrumental in this, as could genuine limited government leaders like Gary Johnson.