Since some people think it's just nutty to recognize that "San Francisco" is being used as a political code term for "scary gay people," I thought I'd track down a little history on it. It's right in line with the republicans' southern strategy, and just as ugly.
http://www.signorile.com/articles/nyp53.htmlWhat exactly is a "San Francisco Democrat"? Like drunken cowboys on horseback storming into California with branding irons in hand, conservative pundits, from The Washington Times’ Cal Thomas to National Review Online’s John J. Miller, began searing that term onto the forehead of Housemember Nancy Pelosi from the moment her name was floated as Democratic leader. It doesn’t appear they’ll be stopping this mad stampede anytime soon, either (interchanging the term with the similar "San Francisco liberal" as well), so intoxicated are they by the Republicans’ nascent control of both houses of Congress.
Some liberal pundits, such as Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo and Joe Conason at Salon, suggested that "San Francisco Democrat" is not-so-subtle code—gay-bashing, pure and simple.
In response, some conservatives have gasped in horror and disbelief. How dare anyone accuse them of such a thing! (For you kiddies out there, this actually is, in a demented sort of way, a measure of slight progress: used to be they gay-bashed and then laughed it off when you called them on it. Now they gay-bash and whirl themselves into a faux-frenzy of indignation when you call them on it, lest anyone realize they might actually be as intolerant as the Republican Party’s own platform proudly boasts of itself.)
Both sides, more or less, have noted that the term originated with former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, in a speech she gave at the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas. In their own defense conservatives say that Kirkpatrick meant the term to connote people who are soft on foreign policy. (San Francisco Democrats are neither hawks nor doves, but "ostriches," Kirkpatrick said.) One conservative blogger thus noted that "San Francisco Democrat" was meant to describe "the blame America first crowd," and expressed outrage that anyone claimed it meant to connote anything about gays. A more well-known online conservative commentator implied that since he is gay himself and is using the term, then it can’t possibly be gay-bashing. (I don’t think I even need to comment on that one.)
Putting aside the idea that being a yellow-belly and a sissy is in many people’s minds only one step removed from being a queer, the problem with this conservative narrative is that it ignores the fact that Republicans very clearly defined the term "San Francisco Democrat" as code for homosexual a few years after Kirkpatrick first uttered the term. And they know exactly what it conveys to a lot of people today, since many of those who are now using the term were around in those Reagan years, as were many Republican strategists who know a smear when they see one—and float one.
It was 3000 miles from San Francisco, in the Senate race in Maryland in 1986, when "San Francisco Democrat" was perfected as a political gay-baiting tool by none other than Linda Chavez—yes, the same Linda Chavez our current president saw fit to nominate as labor secretary and who, thankfully, went down in flames when she was caught flouting labor laws by paying an immigrant worker under the table.
At that time, Republican Party strategists had tried to pull a Norm Coleman—they installed a handpicked, softer-appearing Republican candidate. Chavez, then a young and attractive rising star among the neocons, had previously worked in the Reagan administration and appeared to move to Maryland just to run for the seat. They propped her up to run against popular Democratic Housemember Barbara Mikulski for the open Senate seat in a largely Democratic state, hoping that a pretty face spouting conservative values might sway those white, blue-collar swing voters Reagan himself courted.
Early in the campaign, Chavez explained that because she was married and a mother, unlike her unmarried opponent, she was more in touch with Maryland voters, and began railing against Mikulski as a "San Francisco-style Democrat" who should come "out of the closet."
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