| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
15 May 2005 04:13:33 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Just How Gay Is the Right? |
Just How Gay Is the Right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html?pagewanted=all
By FRANK RICH
Homosexuality is the ticking time bomb within the conservative movement
that no one can defuse.
Frank Rich
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/353d050f49d638a2
Gays
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/4b3564998ab901c2
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Just How Gay Is the Right? |
18 May 2005 03:34:40 PM |
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On 15 May 2005 02:13:33 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
Just How Gay Is the Right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html?pagewanted=all
By FRANK RICH
Homosexuality is the ticking time bomb within the conservative movement
that no one can defuse.
rank Rich: 'Just how gay is the right?'
Posted on Sunday, May 15 @ 09:04:15 EDT
This article has been read 1950 times. By Frank Rich, New York Times
THE screen's first official gay bar," as it was labeled by the film
historian Vito Russo, appeared in the 1962 political potboiler "Advise
and Consent." Its most prominent visitor was a conservative United
States senator.
As sheer coincidence would have it, Otto Preminger's adaptation of
Allen Drury's best seller about a brutal confirmation fight was
released on a sparkling new DVD last week just as the John Bolton
nomination was coming to its committee vote. Like Hollywood's other
riveting political movie of 1962, "The Manchurian Candidate," "Advise
and Consent" is fallout from the McCarthy era: the controversial
nominee for secretary of state (Henry Fonda, who else?) is a stand-in
for Alger Hiss. But it may be in even less need of a remake: the
intervening four decades have cast this film in a highly contemporary
light.
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.
In "Advise and Consent," the handsome young senator with a gay secret
(Don Murray) is from Utah - a striking antecedent of the closeted
conservative Mormon lawyer in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." For
a public official to be identified as gay in the Washington of the
50's and 60's meant not only career suicide but also potentially
actual suicide. Yet Drury, a staunchly anti-Communist conservative of
his time, regarded the character as sympathetic, not a villain. The
senator's gay affair, he wrote, was "purely personal and harmed no one
else." As the historian David K. Johnson observes in "The Lavender
Scare," his 2004 account of Washington's anti-gay witch hunts during
the cold war era, it's the gay-baiters in Drury's novel who "are the
unprincipled menace to the country, using every available tool for
partisan advantage." Preminger's movie takes the same stand (though
the preposterously stereotyped gay bar scene is the film's own
invention).
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.
Their cronies are no different. As The Washington Post reported, Rick
Scarborough, the Texas preacher and Tom DeLay acolyte whose "Patriot
Pastor" network is a leading player in the judiciary battle, first
became active in politics in 1992, when he helped oust a local
high-school principal for the crime of presiding over an
AIDS-awareness assembly. The American Family Association, whose
leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, is a Scarborough ally, had been
whipping up homophobia long before anyone suspected SpongeBob
SquarePants of being a stalking horse (or at least a stalking sea
sponge) for same-sex marriage. So-called research available on the
Wildmon Web site for years - and still there as of last week - asserts
that 17 percent of gay men "report eating and/or rubbing themselves
with the feces of their partners" and 15 percent "report sex with
animals."
Which judges do these people admire? Their patron saint is the former
Alabama chief justice Roy S. Moore, best known for his activism in
displaying the Ten Commandments; in a ruling against a lesbian mother
in a custody case, Mr. Moore deemed homosexuality "abhorrent, immoral,
detestable, a crime against nature" and suggested that the state had
the power to prohibit homosexual "conduct" with penalties including
"confinement and even execution." Another hero is William H. Pryor
Jr., the former Alabama attorney general whose nomination to the
federal bench was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on
Thursday. A Pryor brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Texas
anti-sodomy law argued that decriminalized gay sex would lead to
legalized necrophilia, bestiality and child pornography. It was
Justice Anthony Kennedy's eloquent dismissal of such vitriol in his
2003 majority opinion striking down the Texas statute that has since
made him the right's No. 1 judicial piņata.
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. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man,
ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far
back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our
nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual
movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag
they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he
died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex
partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political
operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so
homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of
the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.
But surely 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.
ALLEN Drury might not have known what to make of Mr. West or of
another odd tic in the 30-year war, 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.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Reprinted from The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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| User: "D-word" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Just How Gay Is the Right? |
18 May 2005 05:58:47 PM |
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stoney wrote:
On 15 May 2005 02:13:33 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
Just How Gay Is the Right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html?pagewanted=all
By FRANK RICH
Homosexuality is the ticking time bomb within the conservative
movement
that no one can defuse.
Where there's smoke there's fire. At least as gay as the rest of the
population, but from the vociferousness of the objections one has to
suspect it might be higher, just repressed. The right are a sexually
repressed lot, that's for sure. Jim West is just the tip of the
iceberg.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Just How Gay Is the Right? |
19 May 2005 12:35:45 PM |
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On 18 May 2005 15:58:47 -0700, "D-word" <yank_ees_suck@yahoo.com>
wrote:
stoney wrote:
On 15 May 2005 02:13:33 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
Just How Gay Is the Right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/opinion/15rich.html?pagewanted=all
By FRANK RICH
Homosexuality is the ticking time bomb within the conservative
movement
that no one can defuse.
Where there's smoke there's fire. At least as gay as the rest of the
population, but from the vociferousness of the objections one has to
suspect it might be higher, just repressed. The right are a sexually
repressed lot, that's for sure. Jim West is just the tip of the
iceberg.
Whores from around the world were flown in to supplement the locals
for the Rethugnican Hypocrite Convention.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
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