For years, it’s been accepted as truth that sitcom star Mindy Kaling was a Republican. (See here, here and here.)
Turns out that everyone was wrong. Salon’s Daniel D’Addario had egg on his face yesterday after he posted a piece titled “Republican” Mindy Kaling brings gun-rights humor to her show.” In it, D’Addario argues that Lahiri’s character on The Mindy Project believes that gun control laws are too restrictive because she says in the season premiere that “It took me longer to get a permit for my handgun!” than it takes to get married. (I’ve linked to the piece, but it’s really not worth reading because it makes no sense.)
That led to this exchange on Twitter between journalist Kate Aurthur and Kaling herself, which finally put the rumor to rest.
@KateAurthur I'm not, it is bewildering!
— Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) September 18, 2013
@KateAurthur Yeah, It's like assuming Alec Baldwin has Jack Donaghys politics or something. It is so weird and funny to me and my staff.
— Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) September 18, 2013
D’Addario then had to update his piece throughout. Adding insult to injury, D’Addario also seemed to completely misunderstand Kaling’s joke. She wasn’t calling gun laws “onerous”, she was making fun of the fact that people can rush into marriage faster than you can buy a gun (and we all know that getting a gun is quite easy.)
But why did everyone think Kaling was a Republican in the first place? It seems like it was because many people simply didn’t understand her use of the word “conservative.”
An often-cited piece of evidence in the “Mindy Kaling is a Republican” argument is this 2007 post on her personal blog about that year’s writers strike. Titled “Why I Strike,” Kaling writes:
What most people don’t know about me is that I’m way conservative. When rumors were circulating this summer about a possible strike, I was annoyed. I was like: “I like working, man. I get paid really well to work on a show people actually like. Screw this!”
I figured the WGA negotiating committee was just a bunch of rich, bored, retired writers who had nothing better to do than make us hard-working currently-employed writers sacrifice a lot by making us stop work. Not coincidentally, I hadn’t been reading any of the informative Guild literature that explained the mounting situation.
Boy, was I a fucking idiot.
Kaling then details what she and other Writers Guild members were fighting for and why striking was important. Let’s take a second to laugh at the fact that the biggest piece of evidence that Kaling was a conservative was a piece called “Why I Strike” and that while she identifies as a conservative early on, she also goes out of her way to call herself an expletive for holding views she then renounced.
Her best-selling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) also helped fuel the rumor. According to the blog Young Cons (emphasis mine):
Her book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, ends with a satire eulogy told through the eyes of a friend in which she describes herself as a “weirdly pro-gun Republican”. This goes along with what Michael Schur (also a writer for The Office) had to say about Mindy during an interview, “She also was very pro-gun, which is very odd”. Schur had just finished saying that “it sort of snuck out that she [Mindy Kaling] was planning on — I don’t know if she did or not — but she was at least thinking about voting for Bush.”
Did Young Cons miss the part about that eulogy being a satire? There were also several small “c” conservative lines in the book, which might have also thrown people off. Here’s a sampling:
“It makes me cry because it means that fewer and fewer people are believing it’s cool to want what I want, which is to be married and have kids and love each other in a monogamous, long-lasting relationship.”
and
“As it is, I guess I find “Jack and Diane” a little disgusting.
As a child of immigrant professionals, I can’t help but notice the wasteful frivolity of it all. Why are these kids not at home doing their homework? Why aren’t they setting the table for dinner or helping out around the house? Who allows their kids to hang out in parking lots? Isn’t that loitering?
I don’t know, all of these sentiments sound more like “I was raised by immigrant parents” views than “I’m a hard-line conservative.” But somehow it all stuck — until yesterday. Thanks for clarifying, Mindy.
Lakshmi Gandhi is a co-founder and editor of The Aerogram. Follow her on Twitter at @LakshmiGandhi or email her at editors@theaerogram.com. Find The Aerogram on Twitter at @theaerogram.
Love this. I identified with what she wrote in her book and I’m by no stretch of the imagination a conservative.
Sometimes we find that politics has overtaken the common words in our English language, conservative, a person who holds on to traditional values and attitudes..not gun totting Republican. Silly.
Hmm. It was a satirical eulogy, but everything else in the description is true of Kaling as she described herself in the book (“Ivy League graduate, actor, comedian, playwright, inveterate gossip, weirdly pro-gun Republican, outspoken advocate of conspicuous consumption”) and it seemed pretty clear in context that the joke for that sentence was a zing at the end: “and of course-as we learned upon the posthumous release of her puffy-sticker-covered-diaries, hard-core perv.”
So I’m a little skeptical of now saying that the “weirdly pro-gun Republican” part also was a joke — it just doesn’t make sense for comic timing. Schur might lack insight into Kaling’s politics, but I call BS on the idea that *he* didn’t think she was a Republican.
I’m betting the truth is that Kaling doesn’t identify as a Republican, isn’t registered as one, etc. But that doesn’t mean she’s not politically conservative. Indeed, lots of people who call themselves “independents” actually don’t identify as Republican because they think the party isn’t conservative *enough* — many Ron Paul supporters fall in this category.