Gay Republican Hypocrisy
Tap-tap- You're Busted! A Brief History of the Hypocrisy of Republican Gay-Bashers
By Tracy Dove, Ph.DEditor, The Russia News Service
August 30, 2007
America loves a sex scandal, especially when the victim deserves it. This week yet another gay-bashing Republican has turned out to be a toilet pervert, giving homosexuality a bad name by associating his dirty men's room habits with the honorable choice of sexual preference. This time it was Larry Edwin Craig- an Idaho congressmen who- when not harassing men in bathroom stalls- stood behind the Christian Republicans in fighting to ban gay marriage, gay rights and homosexuality in the military. We commonly call such people hypocrites, and the origin of the word says a lot of what is really going on in some circles of the Republican party. It comes to us from far-away Greek- and it means literally "stage actor", which is a fitting label for exactly the way these politicians have publicly claimed to champion the moral high ground while reaching an all-time low of criminal behavior in their own sordid private lives.It is particularly disturbing to listen to the right-wing preachers of moral certitude crow about the evils of homosexuality in fire-and-brimstone Technicolor, only to catch them with their pants down in lavatories while tapping impatiently in $200 loafers to get some attention from the guy next door in a public restroom. The blogosphere is naturally having a ball with this one- but how many gay Republican sex scandals have their really been? The answer is quite a few, and they are all entertaining for their hypocritical nature of how the Republican Party has mutated over the years.And the best part is that we don't need to look back any later than 2006 for some ugly examples; we can start with Glenn Murphy Jr., who was the rising star in the Republican Party and headed the Young Republicans' morality division in drumming up support for anti-homosexual legislation. This facade quickly shattered when it was revealed that Murphy had an unusual fetish for masturbating while giving sleeping men oral sex against their will. Then there is Bob Allen, who could be considered a card-carrying member of the toilet creep genre, since he was busted for offering to pay an undercover policeman $20 to give him oral sex. Mark Foley is another, and on the surface he was a crusader against child pornography and wore his morality on his sleeve in Congress until 2006, when it was discovered that he was sending young boys SMS requests to see them naked. Naturally Foley denied the charges, but he also made pains to mention that he had been abused by a gay priest as a child, which of course excuses his desire- in his own words- to "caress" other men in saunas, although for him there was nothing sexual about this whatsoever. But the perverts aren't limited to the beltway elite at all; there is James E. West- the former mayor of Spokane Washington- who, as a Boy Scout leader, is accused of molesting young boys and later surfing on websites to coax high school boys into taking special political assignments in his office. He certainly comes in as runner-up in the Republican hypocrisy awards, since he had voted against gay rights and favored forbidding homosexuals from working in high schools and other public sector positions. But the prize winner of today's contest goes to Ted Arthur Haggard, the reverend who misled 30 million fundamental Christians into following him on a deluded family values crusade in sync with the Bush administration. Preaching against homosexuality as a crime against God, it turned out that "Reverend Ted" had been employing a male prostitute for 3 years and preferred having sex with him after snorting crystal meth. And the list goes on...Haggard finally admitted to his failures and entered drug rehabilitation under the supervision of 4 ministers. Like in an exorcism, Haggard went through hell and back- returning as a cured heterosexual and is now trying to earn a degree in psychology. He was eventually forgiven by his obedient flock, since to forgive is a Christian value, but these Christians never considered forgiving Bill Clinton.This is hypocrisy at its most absurd height; it is true that Clinton's extra-marital affair may not have been becoming of a president, but at least toilets, boy scouts and sleeping men weren't part of his digression. Bill Clinton is guilty of lying under oath; the question as to whether it was ethical behavior requires a brief look back at how other presidents enjoyed their privileges of office. The biggest playboy of this century to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was certainly John F. Kennedy- who was incidentally Clinton's hero- and his Secret Service detail had a special clause in their job description that required sneaking girls in and out of the White House while Jackie re-designed the First Bedroom. Lyndon Johnson, his Vice President and later successor to the presidency- didn't especially like living in the shadow of Kennedy's rooster-like reputation. The anecdote goes that during a White House dinner Johnson was asked about Kennedy's numerous indiscretions and what the president thought about it, but Johnson felt the remark was an attack at his own sexuality. Already tipsy on bourbon, he responded that "I've fucked more women by accident than Kennedy ever did on purpose," which was unfortunate, because Ladybird Johnson happened to be in earshot of the remark.Homosexuality is first and foremost a private affair and people have the right to engage in whatever sexual activity they want as long as no one's rights are being abused. And that goes for heterosexuals too, but the Christian Republicans don't see it this way. The best explanation for this would be to look back at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as it existed under Stalin; as long as you towed the "party line", all mediocrity in political life was excusable. And so it is today in the Republican party, where party loyalty takes precedence over service, common sense and real family values.
Gay GOP misery.
Crossfireby Michael Crowley Post date 10.13.06 Issue date 10.23.06
In the bars and clubs frequented by Washington's gay men, a new character has recently cropped up: the hammered gay Republican. Until recently, says one gay Republican lobbyist, his counterparts on the Hill "had reached a point where you come to your work, you do a good job, you don't cause problems for your boss, and you go home." But then along came the Mark Foley scandal, with its rightwing anti-gay moralizing, liberal snickers about closeted hypocrisy, and a merciless wave of Internet gossip and "outings." The lobbyist says he assumes every gay Republican staffer is "terrified right now." And that has been enough to drive some of them to the bottle. One gay Washingtonian recalls running into an aide to a senior House Republican at a gay bar soon after FoleyGate broke: "He went out to get shitfaced, because he was so stressed out." Chris Crain, a blogger and former editor of the Washington Blade, a gay weekly in Washington, D.C., also says such encounters have become typical. "This weekend, I noticed that the gay Republicans I saw were notably more inebriated than usual. I think they were self-medicating--and I can't blame them."
Not at all. You'd probably drink hard, too, were you in such a socially and politically impossible position. For the dozens of gay Republicans on Capitol Hill--including senior aides to some of the most powerful and moralistic members of the House and Senate--the past few weeks have been a nightmare. On the right, gay Republicans face the likes of Tony Perkins and Pat Buchanan implying that the so-called "velvet mafia" enabled Foley's depredations and claiming linkage between pedophilia and homosexuality. On the left, meanwhile, are gay liberals furious over the Bush-era GOP's gay-baiting and increasingly willing to "out" the Republican regime's closeted enablers--with the help of their tell-all blogs. (Gay political circles have recently been abuzz with talk about "The List," a roster of allegedly gay GOP staffers that has circulated among political journalists and activists.) "These people feel under siege in their own party and also under siege in the gay community," says Crain. The Foley story will blow over eventually, but, given the de facto left-right alliance against them, gay Republicans might be knocking them back for a while to come.
Not that gay Republicans have ever had it easy, of course. For decades, they tended to be closeted entirely--some in the tragically warped model of Joseph McCarthy's henchman, Roy Cohn, who bashed deviants by day and slept with them at night. Or Terry Dolan, co-founder of the vituperative National Conservative Political Action Committee, who, like Cohn, died of aids. By the 1990s, gay Republicans had evolved into a defined party interest group, complete with their own lobbying arm in the Log Cabin Republicans. But the GOP establishment was slow to accept the change. In 1995, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole actually returned a $1,000 contribution to his campaign from the Log Cabin Republicans. During a debate over gay marriage the following year, then-Representative (and now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma seemed to speak for his party's religious-conservative wing when he said that homosexuality is "immoral ... based on perversion ... based on lust."
Even if conservatives never quite embraced the gay politicos within their ranks, however, they rarely turned the screws on them. Rather than eat their own, conservatives smeared Democrats, as when the GOP spread baseless rumors that then-Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley was gay. "We hear it's little boys," an aide to Newt Gingrich whispered to the New York Daily News. (Sorry, wrong Foley!) Instead, "outing" became the pastime of a gay left furious over the aids epidemic. One early victim was the closeted Wisconsin Republican Representative Steve Gunderson, whose voting record drew the aids activists' ire. At a bar one night in 1991, Gunderson was confronted by the activist Michael Petrelis, who furiously demanded, "When are you going to come out?" Petrelis then dumped a Coke on Gunderson before being dragged away. Under relentless pressure from other gay activists (and a few pile-ons from Republicans like Bob Dornan), Gunderson eventually outed himself. Likewise, Jim Kolbe, a gay representative from Arizona who is retiring this year, outed himself in 1996 to preempt the gay newsmagazine Advocate from doing it for him. And, when Arthur Finkelstein--a GOP consultant who produced savage ads for anti-gay candidates like Jesse Helms--was outed the same year, the deed was done by Boston magazine, hardly a right-wing outlet.
After a lull, the liberal outing machine sprang back into action a couple of years ago, as the Bush-DeLay GOP whipped its base into a frenzy over the specter of gay marriage. By then, the outing technology had surpassed dumping drinks on an offender's head; one gay activist with a blog could single-handedly out dozens of Republicans. That's just what a D.C.-based blogger named Michael Rogers began doing around the time of the 2004 congressional gay marriage debate. One early casualty was Virginia GOP Representative Ed Schrock, a rock-ribbed Navy veteran who had co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment. Days after Rogers, working from his apartment in Washington's gay-friendly Adams Morgan neighborhood, posted messages allegedly recorded on a gay phone-sex line by the representative, Schrock retired. Rogers also targeted a slew of congressional staffers, including Robert Traynham, communications director to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who had bizarrely lumped gay marriage with "man-on-dog" sex. Santorum was ultimately forced to release a statement saying he stands by Traynham, whom he described as a target of partisan-based bigotry.
Rogers also zeroed in on a staffer for Oklahoma right-winger Jim Inhofe, who has said he does not hire openly gay or lesbian staffers and once declared himself "really proud" that his recorded family history included no gay relationships. But, as Rogers gleefully revealed, the staffer had posed for a fleshy photo spread in a local gay weekly in which he mused about finding a man with "six-pack abs you could eat chip and dip off of." (In response, Inhofe's office drew a distinction between the senator's personal staff and his committee staff, on which the man worked.) Another senior party operative, Rogers revealed, had posted an online personal ad declaring him to be "just looking for good sex, whether with one or several." Rogers and other gay media outlets had also chronicled Mark Foley's sexuality, a likely reason Foley never tried to run for Senate in Florida.
ven without the likes of Rogers, gay Republicans had been ostracized in Washington's mostly liberal gay community. "After the marriage amendment, that changed everything," a liberal gay activist explains. He recounts a recent night when a stranger began chatting up his friend in a bar. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
"Where do you work?"
"In the government."
"Where in the government?"
"In the Senate."
"Oh. Who do you work for?"
The answer came: a highly conservative senator who had championed the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment. "You gotta be kidding me!" the activist snapped in disgust, breaking off the encounter.
Still, it's not likely that this poor scorned Republican is in danger of an outing. In the wake of the Foley scandal, even some gay Democratic partisans think it's best to ease up the public pressure on their GOP counterparts. "Politically, I think [outing] is a stupid idea right now," says John Aravosis, a prominent D.C.-based gay blogger who has supported outing in the past. "The Republicans are imploding--we don't need to draw attention to ourselves. And this story is already in enough danger of becoming a 'gay story.' We don't need to help it." Crain adds that, whatever frustrations gay liberals might have with their GOP counterparts, their cause benefits if senators like Santorum have regular contact with gays and lesbians--coming to know them as real people and not the perverted caricatures of James Dobson books.
But gay Republicans are hardly off the hook. In the private sphere, their lives are more perilous than ever. For pure vitriol, it would be hard to top an episode that occurred late last month at a Washington dinner party. The gathering included both well-connected Bush administration and congressional GOP staffers and several Democrats--all gay. Inevitably, politics came up. One Democrat in attendance, a former Clinton White House aide, couldn't contain his revulsion at the gay men working in the service of the enemy. "I ripped into this one guy" who works for the Bush administration, the Democrat says. "I said, 'What you do for a living is hurting me, and my family, and my daughter I have with two lesbians. I personally view Bush as the most corrupt, vile politician in the world, and if you're working for him, to me you're one and the same.' People were horrified." But, he adds, "I refuse to be cordial or friendly or polite to these people. I think they are our mortal enemy. They ask the gay community to indulge them when they want a social life, but when they punch the clock they are trying to tear apart our families. They want it both ways." Even a few weeks later, says another gay Washingtonian who was not present at the dinner, the former Clinton aide's "little screed is legendary."
And there are still lone liberal gunmen like Michael Rogers. His goal is to touch off an internal war within the GOP that ultimately brings down the party. He has vowed to out several more GOP staffers between now and Election Day, and says at least one influential conservative leader has cheered him on via e-mail. When I spoke to him this week, he boasted that he had just gotten off the phone with an official at a leading conservative organization, one of whose other senior officials he was about to out. "I think the Foley story ultimately brings to light the fact that the far right wing in America has been duped by the leadership of the GOP," he says, noting that he's communicated directly on the subject with some Christian conservative leaders. With bizarre bedfellows like that, you can't blame a gay Capitol Hill Republican for hitting the bars--and making it a double.
Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Tap-tap- You're Busted! A Brief History of the Hypocrisy of Republican Gay-Bashers
By Tracy Dove, Ph.DEditor, The Russia News Service
August 30, 2007
America loves a sex scandal, especially when the victim deserves it. This week yet another gay-bashing Republican has turned out to be a toilet pervert, giving homosexuality a bad name by associating his dirty men's room habits with the honorable choice of sexual preference. This time it was Larry Edwin Craig- an Idaho congressmen who- when not harassing men in bathroom stalls- stood behind the Christian Republicans in fighting to ban gay marriage, gay rights and homosexuality in the military. We commonly call such people hypocrites, and the origin of the word says a lot of what is really going on in some circles of the Republican party. It comes to us from far-away Greek- and it means literally "stage actor", which is a fitting label for exactly the way these politicians have publicly claimed to champion the moral high ground while reaching an all-time low of criminal behavior in their own sordid private lives.It is particularly disturbing to listen to the right-wing preachers of moral certitude crow about the evils of homosexuality in fire-and-brimstone Technicolor, only to catch them with their pants down in lavatories while tapping impatiently in $200 loafers to get some attention from the guy next door in a public restroom. The blogosphere is naturally having a ball with this one- but how many gay Republican sex scandals have their really been? The answer is quite a few, and they are all entertaining for their hypocritical nature of how the Republican Party has mutated over the years.And the best part is that we don't need to look back any later than 2006 for some ugly examples; we can start with Glenn Murphy Jr., who was the rising star in the Republican Party and headed the Young Republicans' morality division in drumming up support for anti-homosexual legislation. This facade quickly shattered when it was revealed that Murphy had an unusual fetish for masturbating while giving sleeping men oral sex against their will. Then there is Bob Allen, who could be considered a card-carrying member of the toilet creep genre, since he was busted for offering to pay an undercover policeman $20 to give him oral sex. Mark Foley is another, and on the surface he was a crusader against child pornography and wore his morality on his sleeve in Congress until 2006, when it was discovered that he was sending young boys SMS requests to see them naked. Naturally Foley denied the charges, but he also made pains to mention that he had been abused by a gay priest as a child, which of course excuses his desire- in his own words- to "caress" other men in saunas, although for him there was nothing sexual about this whatsoever. But the perverts aren't limited to the beltway elite at all; there is James E. West- the former mayor of Spokane Washington- who, as a Boy Scout leader, is accused of molesting young boys and later surfing on websites to coax high school boys into taking special political assignments in his office. He certainly comes in as runner-up in the Republican hypocrisy awards, since he had voted against gay rights and favored forbidding homosexuals from working in high schools and other public sector positions. But the prize winner of today's contest goes to Ted Arthur Haggard, the reverend who misled 30 million fundamental Christians into following him on a deluded family values crusade in sync with the Bush administration. Preaching against homosexuality as a crime against God, it turned out that "Reverend Ted" had been employing a male prostitute for 3 years and preferred having sex with him after snorting crystal meth. And the list goes on...Haggard finally admitted to his failures and entered drug rehabilitation under the supervision of 4 ministers. Like in an exorcism, Haggard went through hell and back- returning as a cured heterosexual and is now trying to earn a degree in psychology. He was eventually forgiven by his obedient flock, since to forgive is a Christian value, but these Christians never considered forgiving Bill Clinton.This is hypocrisy at its most absurd height; it is true that Clinton's extra-marital affair may not have been becoming of a president, but at least toilets, boy scouts and sleeping men weren't part of his digression. Bill Clinton is guilty of lying under oath; the question as to whether it was ethical behavior requires a brief look back at how other presidents enjoyed their privileges of office. The biggest playboy of this century to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was certainly John F. Kennedy- who was incidentally Clinton's hero- and his Secret Service detail had a special clause in their job description that required sneaking girls in and out of the White House while Jackie re-designed the First Bedroom. Lyndon Johnson, his Vice President and later successor to the presidency- didn't especially like living in the shadow of Kennedy's rooster-like reputation. The anecdote goes that during a White House dinner Johnson was asked about Kennedy's numerous indiscretions and what the president thought about it, but Johnson felt the remark was an attack at his own sexuality. Already tipsy on bourbon, he responded that "I've fucked more women by accident than Kennedy ever did on purpose," which was unfortunate, because Ladybird Johnson happened to be in earshot of the remark.Homosexuality is first and foremost a private affair and people have the right to engage in whatever sexual activity they want as long as no one's rights are being abused. And that goes for heterosexuals too, but the Christian Republicans don't see it this way. The best explanation for this would be to look back at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as it existed under Stalin; as long as you towed the "party line", all mediocrity in political life was excusable. And so it is today in the Republican party, where party loyalty takes precedence over service, common sense and real family values.
Gay GOP misery.
Crossfireby Michael Crowley Post date 10.13.06 Issue date 10.23.06
In the bars and clubs frequented by Washington's gay men, a new character has recently cropped up: the hammered gay Republican. Until recently, says one gay Republican lobbyist, his counterparts on the Hill "had reached a point where you come to your work, you do a good job, you don't cause problems for your boss, and you go home." But then along came the Mark Foley scandal, with its rightwing anti-gay moralizing, liberal snickers about closeted hypocrisy, and a merciless wave of Internet gossip and "outings." The lobbyist says he assumes every gay Republican staffer is "terrified right now." And that has been enough to drive some of them to the bottle. One gay Washingtonian recalls running into an aide to a senior House Republican at a gay bar soon after FoleyGate broke: "He went out to get shitfaced, because he was so stressed out." Chris Crain, a blogger and former editor of the Washington Blade, a gay weekly in Washington, D.C., also says such encounters have become typical. "This weekend, I noticed that the gay Republicans I saw were notably more inebriated than usual. I think they were self-medicating--and I can't blame them."
Not at all. You'd probably drink hard, too, were you in such a socially and politically impossible position. For the dozens of gay Republicans on Capitol Hill--including senior aides to some of the most powerful and moralistic members of the House and Senate--the past few weeks have been a nightmare. On the right, gay Republicans face the likes of Tony Perkins and Pat Buchanan implying that the so-called "velvet mafia" enabled Foley's depredations and claiming linkage between pedophilia and homosexuality. On the left, meanwhile, are gay liberals furious over the Bush-era GOP's gay-baiting and increasingly willing to "out" the Republican regime's closeted enablers--with the help of their tell-all blogs. (Gay political circles have recently been abuzz with talk about "The List," a roster of allegedly gay GOP staffers that has circulated among political journalists and activists.) "These people feel under siege in their own party and also under siege in the gay community," says Crain. The Foley story will blow over eventually, but, given the de facto left-right alliance against them, gay Republicans might be knocking them back for a while to come.
Not that gay Republicans have ever had it easy, of course. For decades, they tended to be closeted entirely--some in the tragically warped model of Joseph McCarthy's henchman, Roy Cohn, who bashed deviants by day and slept with them at night. Or Terry Dolan, co-founder of the vituperative National Conservative Political Action Committee, who, like Cohn, died of aids. By the 1990s, gay Republicans had evolved into a defined party interest group, complete with their own lobbying arm in the Log Cabin Republicans. But the GOP establishment was slow to accept the change. In 1995, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole actually returned a $1,000 contribution to his campaign from the Log Cabin Republicans. During a debate over gay marriage the following year, then-Representative (and now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma seemed to speak for his party's religious-conservative wing when he said that homosexuality is "immoral ... based on perversion ... based on lust."
Even if conservatives never quite embraced the gay politicos within their ranks, however, they rarely turned the screws on them. Rather than eat their own, conservatives smeared Democrats, as when the GOP spread baseless rumors that then-Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley was gay. "We hear it's little boys," an aide to Newt Gingrich whispered to the New York Daily News. (Sorry, wrong Foley!) Instead, "outing" became the pastime of a gay left furious over the aids epidemic. One early victim was the closeted Wisconsin Republican Representative Steve Gunderson, whose voting record drew the aids activists' ire. At a bar one night in 1991, Gunderson was confronted by the activist Michael Petrelis, who furiously demanded, "When are you going to come out?" Petrelis then dumped a Coke on Gunderson before being dragged away. Under relentless pressure from other gay activists (and a few pile-ons from Republicans like Bob Dornan), Gunderson eventually outed himself. Likewise, Jim Kolbe, a gay representative from Arizona who is retiring this year, outed himself in 1996 to preempt the gay newsmagazine Advocate from doing it for him. And, when Arthur Finkelstein--a GOP consultant who produced savage ads for anti-gay candidates like Jesse Helms--was outed the same year, the deed was done by Boston magazine, hardly a right-wing outlet.
After a lull, the liberal outing machine sprang back into action a couple of years ago, as the Bush-DeLay GOP whipped its base into a frenzy over the specter of gay marriage. By then, the outing technology had surpassed dumping drinks on an offender's head; one gay activist with a blog could single-handedly out dozens of Republicans. That's just what a D.C.-based blogger named Michael Rogers began doing around the time of the 2004 congressional gay marriage debate. One early casualty was Virginia GOP Representative Ed Schrock, a rock-ribbed Navy veteran who had co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment. Days after Rogers, working from his apartment in Washington's gay-friendly Adams Morgan neighborhood, posted messages allegedly recorded on a gay phone-sex line by the representative, Schrock retired. Rogers also targeted a slew of congressional staffers, including Robert Traynham, communications director to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who had bizarrely lumped gay marriage with "man-on-dog" sex. Santorum was ultimately forced to release a statement saying he stands by Traynham, whom he described as a target of partisan-based bigotry.
Rogers also zeroed in on a staffer for Oklahoma right-winger Jim Inhofe, who has said he does not hire openly gay or lesbian staffers and once declared himself "really proud" that his recorded family history included no gay relationships. But, as Rogers gleefully revealed, the staffer had posed for a fleshy photo spread in a local gay weekly in which he mused about finding a man with "six-pack abs you could eat chip and dip off of." (In response, Inhofe's office drew a distinction between the senator's personal staff and his committee staff, on which the man worked.) Another senior party operative, Rogers revealed, had posted an online personal ad declaring him to be "just looking for good sex, whether with one or several." Rogers and other gay media outlets had also chronicled Mark Foley's sexuality, a likely reason Foley never tried to run for Senate in Florida.
ven without the likes of Rogers, gay Republicans had been ostracized in Washington's mostly liberal gay community. "After the marriage amendment, that changed everything," a liberal gay activist explains. He recounts a recent night when a stranger began chatting up his friend in a bar. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
"Where do you work?"
"In the government."
"Where in the government?"
"In the Senate."
"Oh. Who do you work for?"
The answer came: a highly conservative senator who had championed the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment. "You gotta be kidding me!" the activist snapped in disgust, breaking off the encounter.
Still, it's not likely that this poor scorned Republican is in danger of an outing. In the wake of the Foley scandal, even some gay Democratic partisans think it's best to ease up the public pressure on their GOP counterparts. "Politically, I think [outing] is a stupid idea right now," says John Aravosis, a prominent D.C.-based gay blogger who has supported outing in the past. "The Republicans are imploding--we don't need to draw attention to ourselves. And this story is already in enough danger of becoming a 'gay story.' We don't need to help it." Crain adds that, whatever frustrations gay liberals might have with their GOP counterparts, their cause benefits if senators like Santorum have regular contact with gays and lesbians--coming to know them as real people and not the perverted caricatures of James Dobson books.
But gay Republicans are hardly off the hook. In the private sphere, their lives are more perilous than ever. For pure vitriol, it would be hard to top an episode that occurred late last month at a Washington dinner party. The gathering included both well-connected Bush administration and congressional GOP staffers and several Democrats--all gay. Inevitably, politics came up. One Democrat in attendance, a former Clinton White House aide, couldn't contain his revulsion at the gay men working in the service of the enemy. "I ripped into this one guy" who works for the Bush administration, the Democrat says. "I said, 'What you do for a living is hurting me, and my family, and my daughter I have with two lesbians. I personally view Bush as the most corrupt, vile politician in the world, and if you're working for him, to me you're one and the same.' People were horrified." But, he adds, "I refuse to be cordial or friendly or polite to these people. I think they are our mortal enemy. They ask the gay community to indulge them when they want a social life, but when they punch the clock they are trying to tear apart our families. They want it both ways." Even a few weeks later, says another gay Washingtonian who was not present at the dinner, the former Clinton aide's "little screed is legendary."
And there are still lone liberal gunmen like Michael Rogers. His goal is to touch off an internal war within the GOP that ultimately brings down the party. He has vowed to out several more GOP staffers between now and Election Day, and says at least one influential conservative leader has cheered him on via e-mail. When I spoke to him this week, he boasted that he had just gotten off the phone with an official at a leading conservative organization, one of whose other senior officials he was about to out. "I think the Foley story ultimately brings to light the fact that the far right wing in America has been duped by the leadership of the GOP," he says, noting that he's communicated directly on the subject with some Christian conservative leaders. With bizarre bedfellows like that, you can't blame a gay Capitol Hill Republican for hitting the bars--and making it a double.
Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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