Wasted Week

Frank Rich: The O'Reilly Factor for Lesbians

Well, it took a whole week from the time the media became obsessed with both Mary Cheney's sexuality and Bill O'Reilly's sexual peccadilloes for Frank Rich to put the two together, but damned if it isn't dynamite. Here's a great paragraph:

When Mrs. Cheney hyperbolically implies that even using the word lesbian in 2004 is a slur out of the McCarthy era - "a cheap and tawdry political trick," she said - she is playing a similar game [to that played by Bush, who used gay-hatred as a political tool by proposing a Constitutional amendment]. She is positioning lesbian as a term comparable to child molester. But as Dave Cullen writes in Salon: "It is not an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It's an insult to gasp when someone calls her a lesbian." Mrs. Cheney and her surrogates are in effect doing exactly what Elizabeth Edwards had the guts to say they were doing: they are sending the message to Mr. Rove's four million [evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000] that they are ashamed of Mary Cheney. They are disowning her under the guise of "defending" her. They are exploiting her for the sake of political expediency even as they level that charge at Democrats.

And Rich recognizes the dramatic consequences that gay and lesbian issues will have for the Republican party in the very near future:

But Mary Cheney isn't the only problem for Mr. Rove as he plays this game. The Republican establishment is rife with gay people - just ask anyone in proximity to its convention in New York - and the campaign doesn't want the four million to know about them, either. But in this election season, actual outing has begun to creep onto the Internet, where the names of closeted Republican congressmen and aides who support anti-gay policies are a Google search away. Some named so far - one of whom dropped out of his re-election campaign in August - hail from districts where some of those four million live.

Sooner or later this untenable level of hypocrisy is going to lead to a civil war within the Republican party. But this hypocrisy is not just about homosexuality - it's about all sexuality, as befits a party that calls for the elimination of Roe v. Wade and the suppression of candid sex education that might prevent teenage pregnancy and AIDS alike. Should Bill O'Reilly-Andrea Mackris tapes exist, as many believe they do, we will learn graphically where the right's most popular cultural defender of G-rated values stands not only on lesbianism but also on extramarital sex, sexual tourism in Asia and masturbation -which all figure in the complainant's detailed description of her alleged conversations with her boss.

That's right; if you've been reading my site consistently, you know that the top two money men in the G.O.P. are G.A.Y. and so is the Congressman who runs the Rules Committee for the Republicans. It's sort of like if Hitler were actually a gay Jew (which some say he was) or if Joseph McCarthy were actually a communist. Eventually, it's hard to run a witch hunt if you're a witch, hard, if you're a gay Jew, to exterminate the Jewish people and all the gays without slitting your own (limp) wrists. And it's getting harder and harder to run political campaigns based on gay-bashing when the folks providing the funds, and the folks who run the party, are either gay or the parents of gay people.