Gay, Republican and on their knees
August 29, 2007 at 12:51 pm by Wayne GarciaThe revelation of the arrest and guilty plea of Sen. Larry Craig to some very gay sounding bathroom activities raises lots of juicy issues (for all my lurking media brethren, first and foremost is, how in the hell does the arrest of a sitting US senator go undiscovered for months??). There’s the whole Gay Republican/oxymoron thing, as well as hypocrisy.
I get the hypocrisy in cases such as Craig’s and state Rep. Bob Allen’s, where they clear anti-gay voting records or ideologies, but I ain’t down with the idea that a gay person morally can’t/shouldn’t be a Republican. People in the GLBT community have every right to, say, enjoy making lots of money or fighting to shrink the size of government or believing that the war in Iraq is going well as anybody in the straight community does, for instance.
But rather than having me opine further, because I’m not gay and I apparently wasn’t much of a Republican either, I asked the head of the local Log Cabin Republican Club (and frequent PoHo blog commenter) Jim Pease if he had some thoughts. Here’s what he sent me:
I can’t say that intolerance is limited exclusively to the Republican Party otherwise we wouldn’t have had the Jim McGreevey debacle. When people can get past the concept of intolerance/fearing/hating gays and lesbians, the “closet” will hopefully become a thing of the past.
Moving on to your inquiry, these “maybe-gay” Republicans are the creator of their own calamity. They create a fantasy that they want to be in but don’t like. Unfortunately they bring a lot of people into this fantasy and it’s these people who suffer the most when it all comes crashing down. I don’t have much compassion for “maybe-gays” but rather I feel sorry for the people around them who were in the fantasy world and didn’t know it.
People like Craig and Allen are idiots. If they think they can lead a double life, hiding something they so vehemently speak out against, then when they get caught “with their pants down” (pun intended), they should be ready to be criticized for following a double standard and prepared to take the consequences. Hypocrites are plentiful, regardless of the party or the issue.
And if all else fails, run to rehab!!!!
Send to a friend:
August 29th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Great screed, Jim - I hope it gets plastered on a wall in a Republican HQ somewhere. But for me the Craig/ Foley /Allen/etc. cases point up exactly why “gay Republican” is an oxymoron. How, if you’re gay, do you endure being a member of a party that gay-bashes to get votes — especially when, so often and so predictably, the bashers turn out to be gay themselves, locked in their closets and their restroom stalls by the attitudes their party fosters?
That aside, Sen. Craig may still turn out to be telling the truth. Possible reasons for the sneaky peeks, the tap-tap-tapping and the frantic TP-waving:
a) He just wanted ask the guy where he got his shoes
b) He needed toilet paper, stat
c) Restless leg syndrome
August 30th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I think Wayne clarified that gay Republican point in his opening remarks. And I bet that if you run the numbers, you’ll find that an overwhelming majority of the people who who are not supportive of gays are, in fact, straight. Your term “so often and so predictably” isn’t supported by the stats.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Oh, of course most homophobes are straight - I wasn’t suggesting that every single right-wing fearmonger is covering up a hidden gay life (though scratch a particularly fierce case of homophobia and you’ll often find the fear is inner-directed).
I’d say the more reprehensible examples of Republican hypocrisy are those straight politicians who think it’s fine to have gays on staff and gays as friends, and in fact even privately believe in equal rights - but when it comes to winning elections, they’re perfectly willing to sell out those friends and staffers and lightly held principles in order to win votes. Gov. Romney springs to mind.