His liberal family was 'overjoyed' when he came out as gay — but not when he came out for Trump

Adam Paul Levine insisted he's not a sex offender. No, he's something "even worse than that."

"I am a Donald Trump supporter," he wrote.

Levine, in an op-ed for The Federalist, explained that his support for the Republican president became such an offense to many of those around him that he's been essentially ostracized.

"I have been unfriended en masse on social media and excoriated by friends who deign to remain," he added. "And I have been singly excluded from social gatherings when the rest of my family was invited."

Did Levine always lean right politically?

Nope. In fact, he was "raised in a liberal Jewish family in Washington D.C., where my dad served as a Democratic congressman for Los Angeles. Accordingly, I was indoctrinated with all of the correct values and views."

With that came Quaker elementary school education that included learning the black national anthem before “The Star-Spangled Banner," Levine recalled.

And when he was 20, Levine said he came out as gay to his family — and "they were duly overjoyed."

More from his op-ed:

It was always a given that Republicans are bad people, representative of that shameful sliver of our flawed society that values money above the planet and think the world would be better off if everyone were a straight, white male. At a minimum they are racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Left to their own devices, they would exclude ethnic minorities from everything, kick sinful gay offspring onto the streets, and pave our parks over with oil derricks.

Of course, there are the less malicious Republicans, the ones who have fallen victim to their gun-toting, Bible-thumping families and sadly do not know any better than what they have been told. This type is not entirely to blame for their ignorance; they just deserve our pity. These truths are held by my family and our extended social and political networks to be self-evident.

But things changed for Levine as he grew older and "the liberal policy agenda became problematic" for him.

"I began to raise questions with my family and friends, and met resistance," he wrote. "It was not because my concerns were particularly inappropriate; I was just not supposed to be questioning at all."

Levine noted that as time went on, he had few friends with whom he could hold a civil political discussion. And then he said one of them "stopped all communication with me for two weeks because Trump won the presidency."

More from his op-ed:

If Republicans are bad, Trump is nothing less than Satan embodied. Post-election family gatherings devolved into group Trump-bashing, which intensified as more rumors of my dubious views wafted across town. I did not even bother going to gay pride because it was fused with a Resist march. If you do not want to impeach our president, you have no place in gay life.

I was labeled a white supremacist by a friend I’ve known my entire life, and completely dropped with no explanation by another dear friend and self-anointed giant of the gay civil rights movement to whom my father had introduced me 15 years ago.

Why has Levine grown more conservative politically?

Levine, who lives in Los Angeles, noted that he's a small business owner, and that liberal platitudes don't amount to much when he's "regularly assaulted with financially crushing, nonsensical red tape and bureaucracy, much implemented as lip service to environmental protection."

The Affordable Care Act? He explained that it's "made medical treatment of my bipolar disorder more expensive than ever."

"With few exceptions," Levine wrote, "every one of my good friends feels more economically hopeless after the 'recovery' than before, and abject homelessness on the streets of my beloved city has swelled to egregious levels."

More from his op-ed:

In desperation, like a closeted teenager sneaking into a porn theater, I surreptitiously began to explore the forbidden territories of Fox News and other conservative outlets. Incredibly, I found myself agreeing more often than not.

Fine, I thought, but that is where I had to draw the line. A couple of conservative encounters does not a conservative make, right? Until more liberals began to recognize the disingenuousness and destructiveness of my party’s stances, I just resolved to stick it out. I did everything in my power to avoid that one last unspeakable, fatal option: turning Republican.

Then came the Harvey Weinstein scandal

After movie producer Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault allegations surfaced this fall, Levine said he realized that "the media outlets that had enabled and covered up his indiscretions for years were the same major public voices for the Democratic Party, the self-proclaimed party of worker’s and women’s rights."

And that was that.

"I reached my threshold where no amount of hypothetical Republican bigotry or greed could approach the magnitude of hypocrisy, corruption, or criminality I saw rotting the Democrats to the core," Levine wrote. "I jumped ship."

You can read  his entire op-ed from the Federalist here.