posted by Damozel |
Mike Roger, infamous outer of anti-gay rights homosexuals in
Congress, says "all bets are off" for lawmakers who are "against gay
rights in...public life and...live a secret homosexual life."(WaPo) Rogers
has apparently targeted----and brought down---nearly three dozen
senior political and congressional staffers, White House aides, and
members of Congress (WaPo) .
He goes for those who live closeted gay lives while pursuing anti-gay
rights agenda, e.g., for those like Larry Craig. Of Larry Craig, he
has this to say: "Hypocrisy," Rogers sneers, "plain, hate-filled
hypocrisy."" (WaPo)
In the coming months, he plans to post the names of "a few more" closeted Congress members on his blog, he says, all of them Republicans. There are 33 names on his published list, most of them men, 30 from the GOP. That fact reveals more about the Republicans, he says, than about him. Although a registered Democrat, he says he is bipartisan.
"I write about closeted people whose records are anti-gay," he says. "If you're a closeted Democrat or Republican and you don't bash gays or vote against gay rights to gain political points, I won't out you." (WaPo)
I have mixed feelings about this, and most of the mixture consists of feeling that this is wrong. I am just not sure of what I think of one gay man outing others because he doesn't like their politics and because he can. Also I am not sure that "hypocrisy" is the right word. But Rogers says:
"When those private lives are in direct conflict with the public policy that these officials espouse, I think it's fair game that their private lives be brought into this. And I have to blog to do that with. Here's the question: What community is expected to protect its own enemies? Don't beat up the gay community, and then expect us to protect your secrets and your double life. It's just not right."(WaPo)
While it's true that perhaps such officials shouldn't expect to be protected, I don't know that it follows that they should expect to be exposed. To play the self-appointed avenging angel strikes me as rather presumptuous. Does Rogers never worry that he's mistaken, either about the double life of the target or about the extent of the target's gay-bashing or lack of support for gay rights?
Mark Agrast, one of the founding members of the Lesbian and Gay Congressional Staff Association said, "We don't have to admire the choices that Craig has made in his life," says Agrast, "to feel some compassion for a 62-year-old man who seeks anonymous encounters because he can't come to terms with who he is."(WaPo)
And I do feel compassion for him. Acts called "hypocritical" often spring out of a person's deep and irreconcilable conflicts. It's possible to know one's own proclivities and to judge them adversely. It's possible to believe in what one preaches without being able to practice it consistently. These struggles make very sad lives. Andrew Sullivan has presented the wisest assessment of this sort of internal divide:
I tend to agree that the term hypocrisy is bandied about far too easily these days.... [I]t means someone who knowingly violates his own publicly professed principles in private. In that respect, Craig is not a hypocrite. When a psyche is as split and damaged as his, hypocrisy is another name for breathing. His record, moreover, indicates that he believes the right role for gay people is not the responsibilities of civil marriage, or even a publicly acknowledged gay identity, or even the decision to risk life and limb in service to country in the military. These are not values the Christianists want gay people to uphold. They believe that gay people, because we are sick, will always seek love and sex solely in public restrooms, that we should never be involved in committed relationships with one another, that we should be barred from serving our country, and stigmatized at every opportunity. And Craig has been consistent in this view, even with respect to himself....
The current GOP...is...looking for the only openly gay allies they can find: those who actually hate themselves with the consistency and instability of a Larry Craig.(The Daily Dish)
Sullivan further elaborates on the tragic implications of Craig's behavior.
[T]he large implications of an almost laughably petty misdemeanor are revealing of problems deeper than one man's personal tragedy. One problem is the cruelty of public discourse. Yes, Craig is a public figure, but he is also a human being, and a gay human being, and I feel for him, for the lies he has told himself and others, for the psychic pain that led him to this place, and for the obvious lack of self-control that his profoundly split identity entailed.I don't think he even knows he's gay.
James E. McGreevy's Washington Post column explains the process by which such a split is engineered:
[As a teenager] I came to the conclusion that my only options were suicide, something for which I could never find the courage, or "closeting" my homosexuality. After all the whispering, fights, insults, reading of academic journals and lessons from the church, you simply say to yourself: This thing, being gay, can't be me. Everything and everyone told me it was wrong, evil, unnatural and shameful. You decide: I'll change it, I'll fight it, I'll control it, but, simply put, I'll never accept it. You then attempt to place "it" in a metaphorical closet, keep it separate from open daily life and indulge it only in dark, secret places.
The danger of this decision is the implicit shame it carries. I was convinced I was worth less than my straight peers. I was at best inauthentic, and the longer I went without amending that dishonesty, the more ashamed I felt. And the third shame, for me, was my behavior. From the time in high school when I made up my mind to behave in public as though I were straight, I nonetheless carried on sexually with men.
How do you live with this shame? How do you accommodate your own disappointments, your own revulsion with whom you have become? You do it by splitting in two. You rescue part of yourself, the half that stands for tradition, values and America, the part that looks like the family you came from, and you walk away from the other half the way you would abandon something spoiled, something disgusting. This is a false amputation, because the other half doesn't stop existing. When I decided to closet my desire, I also denied the possibility of life as a healthy, integrated gay.(WaPo)
For this reason, I am sorry for Craig and Mark Foley and really for all gay members of the Republican party who hold---or wish to hold---conservative values but whose sexual drives keep forcing them out of the path they'd like to walk. . I'd have to know more about the others whom Rogers has outed to know how to feel about them, but the former national field director of the Republican National Committee (fired after being outed by Rogers) wasn't out of order to question Rogers' self-appointed role as Nemesis.
Rogers blogged about Gurley, the former national field director at the Republican National Committee, in September 2004. Gurley, as Rogers tells it, had signed off on an RNC flier sent to conservative voting districts that shows one man proposing to another man. "The GOP wanted to scare voters. 'Look what will happen if the Democrats win!' " Rogers says. Gurley, however, says that he raised objections to the flier and that it wasn't his decision.
"What was I supposed to do?" Gurley says in an interview. He adds: "Who does Rogers think he is? God? What gives him the right to bully people around and tell us what to think or how to conduct our lives?"
When Rogers posted Gurley's Gay.com profile on his blog, the GOP fired Gurley, who's left Washington and lives in North Carolina."(WaPo)
I don't know that Mike Rogers' approach is ultimately the one best designed to address the problem of hypocrisy. But for this to occur, the tide of American history [must] continue.... to sweep toward the inevitable expansion of freedom that recognizes the worth and dignity of every individual." (James McGreevy, WaPo)
With McGreevy, I can but hope "that mine is the last generation that is required to choose between affairs of the heart and elected office."
HERE ARE SOME BLOGGER REACTIONS TO THESE STORIES.
At Feministing, Ann asks the same question about outing anti-gay rights gay Republicans that I do: What purpose does it serve?
The uber-conservative Republican base just writes them off as a "few bad apples," and clearly fails to connect them to their party's culture of repression. I doubt there are many voters thinking, "Hm. So Larry Craig likes to have sex with men in public bathrooms? Guess it doesn't matter much to me, as he's always done such great legislative work." I wish, but no way is that happening! I'm sure it's a much more common, upon hearing a Republican Congressman outed as gay in the wake of a scandal, for their constituents to think, "Gee, that Congressman is a perv. All gay people are totally gross and depraved!" And after an outed politician's inevitable resignation, the odds are good that he will be replaced with a legislator who has an equally anti-gay record.
So really, what's to gain from outing? I suppose it feeds into a larger narrative about Republicans being two-faced. It allows us to feel like we're "punishing" a politician who has long voted against fundamental rights for others. But beyond that...? [ The Politics of Outing]
Exactly.
At Right Wing Nut House, tiny flecks of foam appear on Rick Moran's anti-Rogers post and Rogers' agenda are confounded with that of "the left", as if everyone on the side of the fence opposite Moran agrees that what Rogers is doing is right or good for anyone. I'm not as angry as all that---for one thing, I imagine those on "the right" would prefer to know it if they elect a gay person to Congress, since this is an issue that matters to them---but I am pretty perturbed at the notion that a gay man has appointed himself the official de-closeter of closeted gays and also (more worryingly) the official determiner of who does, and does not, have an "antigay" agenda.
In the twisted, gutter mind of Rogers, if you oppose “gay rights” (whatever that is) and you are a closet homosexual, “all bets are off.”
To say that this is perhaps the most nauseating example of how the left can justify using double standards to advance their political agenda is to state the obvious. But where Roger’s transgressions against decency and humanity really sink to levels unseen before in American politics is his towering conceit about what constitutes “hypocrisy” and how that self defined character flaw in someone else should lead to either ruining their political careers or their lives. [Definition of Pond Scum]
Interestingly, Moran seems to think that Craig, having broken (or "broken") a law and thereby "outed" himself, might have deserve what he got.
Someone like Larry Craig who is “outed” by his own behavior is something different entirely. The people who Rogers has deemed unworthy of being allowed to maintain their privacy regarding their sexual preference have not broken any law nor have they transgressed against any rules in Congress that would make their homosexuality an issue in any way, shape or form. Instead, Rogers applies an extraordinary narrow, close minded, indeed ignorant yardstick to determine whether someone “deserves” to be “outed.
In short, if you oppose his own definition of “gay rights” and refuse to “out” yourself, Rogers will do it for you. [Definition of Pond Scum]
Yes, and this member of (I'm sure he'd think) the "left" joins Moran in thinking that this is wrong. And this is why:
There are many gay Republicans who oppose much of what Rogers considers “gay rights” including gay marriage. Conservative gays have wide ranging opinions on what constitutes gay rights. For Rogers to set himself up as an arbiter of opinion among conservatives – gay or not – about what people should believe is an astonishing demonstration of arrogance. [Definition of Pond Scum]
And that's just it. Who is Mike Rogers to decide what views are---or are not acceptable---for closeted gays to hold? Who is he to be the scourge of those he considers hypocrites? And so on?
LINKED, QUOTED, OR CITED
- Washington Post: Jose Vargas, The Most Feared Man on the Hill? (WaPo)
- Washington Post: James McGreevy, A Prayer for Larry Craig (WaPo)
- The Daily Dish: Andrew Sullivan, The Hypocrisy Point (The Daily Dish)
- The Daily Dish: Andrew Sullivan, The Larry Craig Affair (The Daily Dish)
RELATED BN-POLITICS POSTS
- Sen. Craig's Arrest: Was there Enough Evidence? (Updated)
- Bathroom Blunder Causes Compassionate Conservatives to Eat Their Own
- It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid (Part 3)...
- Hypocrisy Bites: A Few Simple Rules for Imperfect Politicians It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid (Part 2)...
- It's Not the Sin; It's the Hypocrisy: Some Highly Germane Words on the Subject from Christ and Dostoevsky.
- Sen. Vitter "Ensnared" in Prostitution Scandal
- Jon Swift Quotes: Are Conservatives Less Gay than Alleged?
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