The other day, I wrote about Tim Ravndal, the Tea Party leader in Montana whose Facebook wall played host to a little good old fashioned anti-gay “humor,” when Ravndal and one of his friends joked about taking care of the gays by hanging them up for “decoration,” like Matthew Shepard. Lots of other people wrote about it too.
The right people got the message, it seems, because Ravndal has been fired:
The Big Sky Tea Party Association removed its president, Tim Ravndal, after inflammatory comments from his Facebook page surfaced in national blogs and local media.
In a press release, Board Chair Jim Walker of the Tea Party group based out of Helena, called Ravndal’s comments “unacceptable,” and said that the group learned about them Saturday, when an article about the comments was published in the Tribune.
The exchange between Ravndal and another Facebook user named Dennis Scranton was originally posted on July 23 on Ravndal’s personal Facebook page.
“The discussion in that Facebook conversation is entirely outside the position of the Big Sky Tea Party,” Walker said in the statement. “We continually make it known that we will not tolerate bigoted dialog, behavior or messages at our functions, our meetings or within our ranks.”
Roger Nummerdor, a former president and current member of the association’s board or directors, said Ravndal’s statements were “completely” outside the Big Sky Tea Party’s mission statement, which he said focuses on such principles as limited government and fiscal accountability on a government level.
Since we’re talking about Montana here, where the strains of libertarianism and conservatism that would inform their Tea Party movement have long had more of a Western “You Kids Get Off My Lawn Ranch” flavor, I’m inclined to believe Ravndal’s peers probably were genuinely disgusted.
I could be wrong, and if this were Alabama, I’d probably be saying “way to save face!” Time will tell, then. We’ll see if Ravndal pops back up, having been shuffled to a different place of leadership in Greater Teabaggistan, or whether he’s shut out for good.
[h/t Joe Sudbay]
That’s an insult to Alabama, but whatever.
Actually, it’s just a difference between the movements in two different regions. Conservatism is much more fused with social conservatism in the South than it is in states like Montana and Wyoming, which have long had a completely unique strain of conservatism/libertarianism.
It’s funny — back when Democrats were voting to ban gay marriage and openly gay troops, and today when the Democratic President actively fights to preserve the anti-gay marriage laws, the only political movement supporting our rights was the libertarians.
The thanks for that early critical support is getting dumped on, I guess.
While it’s great they fired this a*****e it would be a mistake to think this means they support gay causes.
This could be the start of something good, though I suspect that Revndal was fired for saying what a large number of tea partiers think. I have seen articles around saying that Tea Partiers are not homophobic, but from what I have seen, they are. Revndal just got a tad too vocal about it.
For the Tea Party to be taken seriously on this, decrying homophobia and supporting GLBT civil rights is the least that they can do. However, they won’t because that would alienate a large percentage of their base.
The Tea Party is working hard to stay focused on their economic agenda. They know that overt bigots like Mark Williams and Tim Ravndal will cause their movement to be discredited by sentiments that don’t represent what they are primarily trying to accomplish — a preemptive anti-government spending campaign to prevent sane politicos from spending the money that’s actually needed to keep us afloat economically and to get us out of the “Great ‘Recession’” sooner rather than much later). This is why they had to get rid of those two clowns quickly.
I’m guessing they had some high level political talent helping them to make these decisions. Because if it were left to the much larger number of yahoos in the movement, they could have screwed it up pretty badly.
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