Huckabee, Paul, McCain & Romney: they would all take the country in the wrong direction.

Since trudging through the snows of Iowa in the first week of January, most of the Republican contenders have fallen by the wayside, leaving only John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee, and the viability of Huckabee’s candidacy likely will not survive Super Tuesday; at this point, he seems more to be running for vice-president. Ron Paul remains in the race but is not taken seriously as a contender for the Republican nomination.

There is so much wrong with the positions that all the Republican candidates have taken on all the important issues — from education to the environment, from Iraq to Iran, from taxes to torture — that I cannot even begin to fit it all in within the space limitations of a blog post. So, in explaining why I will not be voting for a Republican on Super Tuesday, I’m going to confine myself to LGBT issues. And there, it’s fair to say that the records of the Republicans on our issues range from bad to horrendous.

As the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force scorecard on LGBT issues shows, there is a stark difference between the Democratic and the Republican candidates on our issues. The relatively small differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on LGBT issues pale in comparison with the differences between the two remaining contenders for the Democratic nomination and their Republican counterparts.

The Log Cabin Republicans seemed to have pinned their hopes on Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy, but when that came to an abrupt end after his embarrassing and disastrous third-place finish in Florida, there was no one left in the Republican field with a credible claim to LGBT support. In truth, Giuliani’s record on LGBT issues was extremely weak and grossly exaggerated by the media, and in the end, he was willing to run away from even that, in an effort to pander to the religious right in Florida and nationally.

Huckabee has arguably the worst record on LGBT as well as HIV/AIDS issues. In 1992, Huckabee made the most explicitly homophobic and AIDS-phobic comments, even calling for a quarantine of people with AIDS and refusing to recant since. To be fair to Huckabee, he is arguably more moderate on social welfare issues than his Republican competitors, but he so exemplifies the religious right in his views on social values issues that he must be regarded as anathema to members of the LGBT community.

Ironically enough, it was the letter that Mitt Romney wrote to the Log Cabin Republicans in 1994 promising to be a strong advocate for the rights of lesbian and gay people in Massachusetts that is now apparently being used against him by John McCain’s campaign. But Romney long ago lost whatever good will there may have been for him in the LGBT community in Massachusetts and nationally by attempting to use his authority as governor to reverse the state supreme court ruling that made Massachusetts the first state to recognize same-sex marriage. And Romney has flip-flopped so much on reproductive choice and just about every other major policy issue now under discussion that no one can be sure if he has any firm commitments to anything but his own political advancement.

Of the three Republicans remaining in the race, John McCain has the best reputation and the greatest potential appeal among independents and even moderate Democrats; but that reputation is based on his somewhat independent views on only a few issues. On immigration, torture, and campaign finance reform, McCain is at odds with the base of his party, but on virtually every other issue, he is as assuredly right-wing a Republican as anyone. And his campaign’s recent attempts to gay-bait Romney over the letter to LCR shows that McCain will not hesitate to use homophobic tactics to ingratiate himself with the religious right. No LGBT activist I know would ever consider voting for McCain, whose record on LGBT issues is abysmal.

Finally, we have to take note of Ron Paul, who is a classic libertarian and therefore as inclined to get the government out of the bedroom as well as out of your wallet. While a President Paul probably would not back any anti-LGBT legislation or constitutional amendments, he would also not likely do anything to advance LGBT rights. And leaving contentious social issues to the states will do little to help LGBT people in states where there is currently no majority in favor of LGBT rights. But Ron Paul has no chance of winning the Republican nomination anyway, so the question is a purely hypothetical one.

In brief, none of the Republicans have even a plausible claim to be pro-LGBT and none deserve serious consideration by members of the LGBT community.