Just How Gay Is the Right?
What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.
But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West's long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of "Angels in America" - who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who has sex "with guys" - Mr. West has said he had "relations with adult men" but doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy - it's pathology.
ALLEN Drury might not have known what to make of Mr. West or of another odd tic in the 30-year war, the recurrent emergence of gay-baiting ideologues with openly gay children (Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Alan Keyes). According to Mr. Johnson's fresh scholarship in "The Lavender Scare," a likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury's "Advise and Consent" was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son's arrest in Lafayette Park on "morals charges." Those were the dark ages, but it isn't entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West.
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Gay vs. Pedophile
Mayor West has been accused of sexually molesting teenaged Boy Scouts, this may indicate that he is a pedophile, not gay. I wonder how young his adult male sex partners look. He may be a pedophile that is no longer breaking the law, but still likes to pretend to have sex with teenagers. There needs to be an awareness of how the Radical Right tries to say that homosexuals and pedophiles are the same thing, when they are not. Having worked with child molesters, I know that the statistics bear out that over 90% of pedophiles (child molestors) are heterosexual, white males.
Jimmy Swaggart
would be a well known case in point. It was "school girls" that turned this dirty old "minister" on.
The fact that the mayor thought that he was courting a 17 yr old boy seems an important part of this story, to me.
Of course the hypocrisy, is very hard to fathom in the concept of "gay republicans". I just can't seem to get it. Is it self-loathing that would bring a person to fight against his own very nature, expressed in others, i.e. gay bashing and fighting against the rights of gays? What else could it be?
What about, for example, Congressman Dwyer, how do these open gay bashers react to him behind the closed doors of the congress? How does he keep pretending not to be gay and helping to draft anit-gay legislation?
When the subject of the mayor came up on a pannel discussion last weekend I was very surprised to hear a "reporter" refer to the fact that there are also democratic politicians who are gay. As if the point was that there are gay people in politics was the subject. Isn't the real subject the republican anit-gay policies, from those who are gay? If democrats were preaching against gays, I would be all over them, but for the most part democrats ar about fairness for all and taking the hate out of the subject.
I would think that we would be the party where gays would find a home. I have no idea why they would be republicans, even if they are longing to be rich and have public power and envision the world in a haves and have-nots republican way. Is it worth giving up the power to be who one is? For the first time in our history as a nation gay people have the opportunity to live openly and honestly in the life-style that is most comfortable for them and some of them choose instead to prevent and even distroy any progress in that direction. The longer I live the less I understand.
Proud member of the reality based community.
Ted's essay wasn't about Gay Republicans,
Rather, it was the blogosphere's version of "yellow journalism:
All I can say is that both the highlighted actions and the way this was written up are wonderful deterrents to any gay individuals, who could be great assets to us, pulling away from the Log Cabin Republicans.
Why don't you contact Andy Tobias, DNC National Treasurer, to have him write up a useful contribution to this thread.
With my best wishes,
Juli Briggs
Alabama
Nothing could be further
Nothing could be further from the truth. Ted's blogs consistently point out the hypocrisy of the neocon/religious right's stance against the gay and lesbian community.
To use neoconservative Republican gays to bash the gay community is the same odious mindset that allows so-called "Christians" to bash other religions, including different sects of Christianity.
Don't be so quick to judge, until you have researched Democrats.com in its entirety and get a feel for the contributors here.