If you are a woman, a person of color, and/or a homosexual and you try to convince me that you are a conservative or a Republican, I will laugh at you. The idea is a contradiction in terms. Somehow you have believed the lies that have been told to you by our media. Somehow you have lost touch with the reality that conservatism is a movement of and for white, straight, Christian males. I am aware that many aforementioned white straight males are now livid after reading these past few sentences. You’re all shouting, “So we’re the bad guy; we’re the only group who has ever been the oppressor in the world.” No, that’s not entirely correct, you’re just the group that’s most often the oppressor. How’s that working out?

I always enjoy reading books by people like Ann Coulter, who writes grandiose battle stories of the heroic conservatives who beat back the demanding and foul mouthed liberals who want to rob the rich of their hard earned money, who have sexual intercourse for pleasure and not to procreate, who take great pleasure in a good old fashioned abortion, and who use the American flag as a bib for their insatiable feast of perversion. Ann Coulter is the J.R.R. Tolkien of the right wing, second only to the supremely boring Bill O’Reilly. The icing on the Coulter cake is that the woman looks like the welfare-mother-turned-prostitute that she is constantly calling out against for depleting her colleagues of their disposable income. She’s always wearing some terrible magenta Channel suit with her blonde tresses all falling seductively over her hunched and nerdy frame. She looks like an alumna of the Ron Jeremy School of Congeniality. She is always talking down about feminists or women, who don’t shirk their responsibility as a woman (the way she does): to fight for equality in a world that they do not control.

My good friend Tom, a wonderfully smart and sarcastic Harvard University graduate, is a gay libertarian. He and I shared conversation upon conversation concerning public policy, government subsidies, taxes, and the welfare state. He makes quite the fiesty argument for the libertarians in America, however, I doubt that any of his libertarian counterparts would ever make an argument in favor of him as a gay male. When the middle of the summer rolled around, the Supreme Court ruling against sodomy laws made Tom feel misaligned with the libertarian platform he had once so whole-heartedly aligned himself with. Suddenly, everyone was talking about gays, gay marriage, sodomy, sin, right and wrong, and Tom’s “live and let die” world as a libertarian seemed to turn upside down. He was torn between his politics and his persona. He was facing (as many gay, minority, or women republicans/conservatives will be forced to someday face) the fact that his politics would ultimately leave him out of their platform and their world.

What do I want to say to Condoleeza Rice? The same thing that was said to Clarence Thomas by Leon Higginbotham in an open letter that was printed in many newspapers when Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court: “What have the conservatives of this country ever done for people of color?” Perhaps Ms. Rice missed that question because Clarence Thomas was never able to answer it. He never wanted to answer it because it’s easier to believe what conservatives want people of color to believe: that conservatives aren’t racist, that the scope of the American Dream includes people of color, that conservatives want to “make things better and more equal” between white people and people of color.

These are lies. Things are not getting better. Before 9-11 and the resulting reverence paid to the New York Police Department, the NYPD were not the crew to revere. Are you offended by that statement? Good, because I bet Patrick Dorismund’s mother was offended when an undercover New York Policeman shot and killed him. I bet Amadou Diallo’s family was very offended when they found out that Amadou had been shot and killed by New York police officers when he was pulling out his wallet to show identification. Did he die from loss of blood from one gunshot? No. Diallo was shot 41 times. That’s a lot of bullets. When the wallet hit the ground, did it still look like a gun? Things are “more equal” now that affirmative action is being systematically phased out, right? Now we can go back to de facto discrimination, and everything will be nice and tidy and equal, right?

You readers can dismiss my opinion as more “liberal muckraking” in the media if you like. I love that myth about the media: it’s entertaining, and it’s the best example of how far conservatives will go to advance their racist, homophobic, misogynistic, classist agenda. Do you think that people like Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, or Bryant Gumble are democrats? Do you think they actually vote with their viewers in mind, or their six-figure income? I think that conservatives actually think that the media is liberal because it’s never as cruel, white, straight, restrained, or Christian as they want it to be (except Fox News).

So why would I laugh at you if you, a woman, a gay or lesbian, or a person of color told me you were a republican or conservative? Because your politics will someday leave you out; your politics will eliminate you.

Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.