The Gay Old Party
Comes Out
By FRANK RICH, OP-ED
COLUMNIST, NYTimes on the Web, October 15, 2006
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich |
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PAGING Tony Perkins of the Family
Research Council: Here’s a gay Republican story you probably did not hear
last week. On Tuesday a card-carrying homosexual, Mark Dybul, was sworn
into office at the State Department with his partner holding the Bible.
Dr. Dybul, the administration’s new global AIDS coordinator, was flanked by
Laura Bush and Condi Rice. In her official remarks, the secretary of state
referred to the mother of Dr. Dybul’s partner as his “mother-in-law.”
Could wedding bells be far behind? It was all on display, photo included,
on www.state.gov. And
while you’re cruising the Internet, a little creative Googling will yield a long
list of who else is gay, openly and not, in the highest ranks of both the Bush
administration and the Republican hierarchy. The openly gay range from Steve
Herbits, the prescient right-hand consultant to Donald Rumsfeld who foresees
disaster in Iraq in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” to Israel Hernandez,
the former Bush personal aide and current Commerce Department official whom the
president nicknamed “Altoid boy.” (Let’s not go there.)
If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The
revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election
year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually
every other power center in America. “What you’re really seeing is the
Republican Party on the Hill,” says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log
Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000
campaign. “Across the board gay people are in leadership positions.”
Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost
nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did
drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex
marriage.
The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t
just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove.
Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay
card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr.
Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from “The
Architect,” the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne
Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was
openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future
case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.
So will Kirk Fordham, the former Congressional aide who worked not only for Mark
Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who
gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family’s “recorded history”
was gay) and Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican
primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the “radical homosexual
agenda”). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who
brought up incest and “man-on-dog” sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has
employed a gay director of communications. In the G.O.P. such
switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.
As for Mr. Foley, he is no more representative of gay men, whatever their
political orientation, than Joey Buttafuoco is of straight men. Yet he’s a
useful creep at this historical juncture because his behavior has exposed and
will continue to expose a larger dynamic on the right. The longer the
aftermath of this scandal continues, with its maniacal finger-pointing and
relentless spotlight on the Republican closet, the harder it will be for his
party to return to the double-dealing that has made gay Americans election-year
bogeymen (and women) for so long.
The moment Mr. Foley’s e-mails became known, we saw that brand of fearmongering
and bigotry at full tilt: Bush administration allies exploited the former
Congressman’s predatory history to spread the grotesque canard that
homosexuality is a direct path to pedophilia. It’s the kind of blood libel
that in another era was spread about Jews.
The Family Research Council’s Mr. Perkins, a frequent White House ally and
visitor, led the way. “When we elevate tolerance and diversity to the
guidepost of public life,” he said on Fox News Channel, “this is what we get —
men chasing 16-year-old boys around the halls of Congress.” A related note
was struck by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which asked, “Could a
gay Congressman be quarantined?” The answer was no because “today’s
politically correct culture” — tolerance of “private lifestyle choices” — gives
predatory gay men a free pass. Newt Gingrich made the same point when he
announced on TV that Mr. Foley had not been policed because Republicans “would
have been accused of gay bashing.” Translation: Those in favor of
gay civil rights would countenance and protect sex offenders.
This line of attack was soon followed by another classic from the annals of
anti-Semitism: the shadowy conspiracy. “The secret Capitol Hill
homosexual network must be exposed and dismantled,” said Cliff Kincaid of
Accuracy in Media, another right-wing outfit that serves as a grass-roots
auxiliary to the Bush administration. This network, he claims, was allowed
“to infiltrate and manipulate the party apparatus” and worked “behind the scenes
to sabotage a conservative pro-family agenda in Congress.”
There are two problems with this theory. First, gay people did not
“infiltrate” the party apparatus — they are the party apparatus. Rare is
the conservative Republican Congressional leader who does not have a gay staffer
wielding clout in a major position. Second, any inference that gay
Republicans on the Hill conspired to cover up Mr. Foley’s behavior is
preposterous. Mr. Fordham, the gay former Foley aide who spent Thursday
testifying under oath about his warnings to Denny Hastert’s staff, is to date
the closest this sordid mess has to a whistle-blower, however tardy. So
far, the slackers in curbing Mr. Foley over the past three years seem more
straight than gay, led by the Buffalo Congressman Tom Reynolds, who is now
running a guilt-ridden campaign commercial desperately apologizing to voters.
A Washington Post poll last week found that two-thirds of Americans believe that
Democrats would behave just as badly as the Hastert gang in covering up a
scandal like this to protect their own power. They are no doubt right.
But the reason why the Foley scandal has legs — and why it has upstaged most
other news, from the Congressional bill countenancing torture to North Korea’s
nuclear test — is not just that sex trumps everything else in a tabloid-besotted
America. The Republicans, unlike most Democrats (Joe Lieberman always
excepted), can’t stop advertising their “family values,” which is why their
pitfalls are as irresistible as a Molière farce. It was entertaining
enough to learn that the former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed wanted to
go “humping in corporate accounts” with the corrupt gambling lobbyist Jack
Abramoff. The only way that comic setup could be topped was by the news
that Mr. Foley was chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus.
It beggars the imagination that he wasn’t also entrusted with No Child Left
Behind.
Cultural conservatives who fell for the G.O.P.’s pious propaganda now look like
dupes. Tonight on “60 Minutes,” David Kuo, a former top official in the
administration’s faith-based initiatives program, is scheduled to discuss his
new book recounting how evangelical supporters were privately ridiculed as
“nuts” in the White House. If they have any self-respect, they’ll exact
their own revenge.
We must hope as well that this crisis will lead to a repudiation of the ritual
targeting of gay people for sport at the top levels of the Republican leadership
in and out of the White House. For all the president’s talk of tolerance
and “compassionate conservatism,” he has repeatedly joined Congress in wielding
same-sex marriage as a club for divisive political purposes. He sat idly
by while his secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, attacked a PBS
children’s show because an animated rabbit visited a lesbian couple and their
children. Ms. Spellings was worried about children being exposed to that
“lifestyle” — itself a code word for “deviance” — even as the daughter of the
vice president was preparing to expose the country to that lifestyle in a highly
promoted book.
“The hypocrisy, the winking and nodding is catching up with the party,” says Mr.
Tafel, the former Log Cabin leader. “Republicans must welcome their
diversity as the party of Lincoln or purge the party of all gays. The
middle ground — we’re a diverse party but we can bash gays too — will no longer
work.” He adds that “the ironic point is that the G.O.P. isn’t as
homophobic as it pretends to be.” Indeed two likely leading presidential
competitors in 2008, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, are consistent supporters of
gay civil rights.
Another ironic point, of course, is that the effort to eradicate AIDS, led by a
number of openly gay appointees like Dr. Dybul, may prove to be the single most
beneficent achievement of this beleaguered White House. To paraphrase a
show tune you’re unlikely to hear around the Family Research Council, isn’t that
queer?
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