Frank Rich: "Just How Gay Is the Right?"

NY Times op-ed:
Just How Gay Is the Right?
By FRANK RICH
Published: May 15, 2005


....By all rights "Advise and Consent" should be terribly dated. The cold war is now so over that the American and Russian presidents are bonding in Red Square. The film's Kennedy-era ambience - both a J.F.K. brother-in-law (Peter Lawford) and former lover (Gene Tierney) are in the cast - seems as retro as the Hula-Hoop. But when the pivotal gay plot twist kicks in, "Advise and Consent" taps into unfinished business that roils the capital as much, if not more, today than it did then. In 2005, homosexuality is no longer the love that dare not speak its name (the word is never mentioned in the movie), but as Washington fights its nuclear war over the judiciary, it is the ticking time bomb within the conservative movement that no one can defuse....

***

That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It's a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-"activist" judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they're for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that "Advise and Consent" so powerfully extols.

Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla., and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration of War" against homosexuality. A quarter-century later these views remained so unreconstructed that Mr. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson would go so far as to pin the 9/11 attacks in part on gay men and lesbians - a charge they later withdrew but that Mr. Robertson repositioned just two weeks ago. In response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, he said he now believes that activist judges are a more serious threat than Al Qaeda....

***

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....(S)urely 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....(A)nother odd tic in the 30-year war, (is) 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. Check out the good old days in "Advise and Consent," not to mention Charles Laughton's valedictory performance as a Bible Belt senator who ultimately puts patriotism over partisanship, and weep.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html?hp

Is it really too hard to figure out that anyone who is obsessed with other people's sex lives is telling us more about his/her own problems than about anybody else's?

Does anyone doubt that Fred Phelps has some serious, serious issues with his own sexuality?

The whole Hager thing illustrates the whole issue perfectly. Didn't we all suspect he was into some really kinky control games in his own life, since he was so obsessed with controlling the sex lives of all women?

We need to get that meme out more! Obsession with sexuality (of teenagers, gays, whoever) = major perv!

am glad to see this story in the NYT.

It just shows that any attack the right makes upon the left has the purpose of ultimately covering up their own hypocrisy and hide their state of being morally bankrupt.

and this is the single most important paragraph in his piece:

Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's, when the Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant championed the overturning of an anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla., and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly formed Moral Majority issued a "Declaration of War" against homosexuality

but he masterfully explains why almost every tactic the religious right takes finds it's basis in their unrelenting hatred of gays and lesbians and their obsessive quest to stop women from having reproductive choice.

What do you think the national debate about filibusters is about? Hint: It ain't about filibusters.

Why do you think so many of us are shouting for Dems to stand up with integrity and fight for civil same sex marriage? It's a HUMAN RIGHTS issue, stupid. And, ultimately, you never lose when you're on the side of human rights.

so they can pass all the Nazi like legislation that they can think of.

TYY:kick:

between the "RoyCohns" and our normal neighbours. It's MUCH deeper than hypocritical- it IS pathological. Bill Bennet to Henry Hyde to Mayor West, there is a VERY SICK disconnect accompanied by a determination to "punish THE OTHER" in a show of dominance and power. I hope folks can sense the difference and leave Adam and Steve, their manicured yard and greenhouse full of orchids ;-) OUT OF THIS!

and I love your phrase "manicured yard and greenhouse full of orchids." That image is so far from any image in my mind connected to those about whom you're pointing out a distinction.

Construction materials and dandelions.

no orchids here!

And on edit, my guess is you're an activist, with little time to weed out dandelions --

And so long as they have the POWER, the rules do not apply to them.

How can this guy be so damned excellent, week after week after week?

fine actor.

Hi to you, NYCGirl. Would you do me one kindness and tell my former city-of-residence hello for me? Just a quick lean out the window and a wave will do. I miss it a lot.

Nice to meet you on DU.

I'm in my office on East 23rd St. right now.

Where are you living now? (I'm originally a SF native, BTW.)

It's just that every now and then I need to be in Benny's Burritos or see a film in the Village or bop in to the Strand...

You know the story. And your office is in a good spot, too -- good for you!

All good wishes to you, NYCGirl

should read this and weep...

Just to prove to the world that they "ain't one of them fairies" while drooling over the "real" men they so admire.

And right on the money. Thank you for posting this.