[Assam] From NY Times---The Gay Old Party Comes Out/By FRANK RICH-2

[Chan Mahanta]

Ooops! Didn't realize that it was a restricted 
circulation piece from the NYT Pay site. So here 
it is in text:


Markhowas may enjoy this or reel from it, depending on political leanings.

But this is not for all. Open at your own risk :-).

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/opinion/15rich.html

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Op-Ed Columnist
   The Gay Old Party Comes Out



By FRANK RICH

Published: October 15, 2006


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."

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich.
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Barry Blitt


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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