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Why Foleygate as a metaphor for GOP
governance is finally doing what Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, Ney, Norquist,
Reed, etc. haven’t done to a scandal-weary but resilient religious base,
summarized here with considerable understatement by Washington Post columnist
Eugene Robinson, in his column ‘Values’
Choice for the GOP: “So for a party that crusades against gay marriage and
welcomes voters that consider homosexuality a sin or a disease, headlines about
a gay Republican congressman lusting after underage male congressional pages
are a problem.” The Arlington Group, a coalition of 70 social conservative groups,
called for Speaker Hastert to resign over the Foley cover up, as did a
Washington Times editorial and Richard Viguerie, one of the neoconservatives’
earliest and largest fundraisers.
For those of us who are not homophobic, this is not a sex scandal, it is
about trust and credibility. The GOP has worn out its Hypocrisy card and those
winks and nods no longer work. KwC The Gay Old Party Comes
Out 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 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 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 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 GOP’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 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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