Bob Hope’s Social Liberalism?

So….my understanding of Bob Hope has always been as a right-winger. But this makes a fairly compelling case that not only was he not a terrible person, but that he suffered some for his beliefs from the right.

These tactics are nothing new. Since the mid-1970s, when gun and homophobic extremists found a home in the Republican Party, they have tried to silence their opposition through censorship, de-platforming, and boycotts. And one of their first targets for repeated cancellation was— of all people—Republican icon Bob Hope, a comedian who (unlike today’s generation of streaming comics) did not think it was his job to offend anyone. In 1977, gospel singer Anita Bryant fronted the noxious Save the Children campaign in Dade County, Fla. A forerunner to Governor DeSantis’s Don’t Say Gay bill, Bryant’s homophobic crusade sought to roll back gay rights and anti-discrimination legislation, with the chief aim of banning gay people from teaching school. And like her modern-day Florida descendants in the art of right-wing gay panic, Bryant routinely lied about the gay community, linking it to pedophilia. “Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach,” she claimed.

Hope, Johnny Carson, and any number of comics ridiculed Bryant’s bigotry, but with Hope it was personal, as it also was for Bryant. By then, his oldest daughter, Linda Hope, had come out to him and moved in with her partner. She worked with her father at NBC, and continued to do so over the long span of his career. Hope had known Bryant since they both had performed in USO shows in Vietnam. Despite their friendship, Hope began making Bryant jokes in his act. The jokes were his usual lightweight jabs: “They’re naming a street after Anita Bryant in Miami. Of course, it’s one-way.”

After a few months of this, the religious right boycotted him. “The Associated Press reported that comedian Bob Hope had been asked by Texaco to stop making jokes about me and ‘gay’ liberation,” recalled Bryant in her memoir, At Any Cost. “Here was a case of the silent masses voicing protest. This is the first instance of a type of boycott by concerned Americans and Christians that had come to my attention.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Hope told Larry King. Unlike Carson, whose Tonight Show had multiple sponsors, Hope had only one: Texaco. “They say to me, ‘Bob can’t you let up on this a little? It’s a very touchy subject.’ Well, of course I can’t because I work on topical humor.” After Save the Children’s 1977 victory in Dade County, the issue ceased to be topical, and Hope stopped (for a while). In a later interview about gay rights, headlined “Why I Don’t Agree With the War on Homosexuals,” Hope didn’t mention his daughter, but he emphasized his firm support of gay rights. “We’re all entitled to our own sexual habits,” he said.

I have no real personal context to analyze this, but….it’s very interesting!