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For his entire career, California’s Bible belt state Sen. Roy Ashburn was best known for sound bites like this one, dating to 2005. At a rally he organized to drum up support for a ban on same-sex marriage, the powerful Republican from Bakersfield stood beside the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, Lou Sheldon, proclaiming heterosexual marriage “fundamental to civilization,” as Sheldon made vile claims about the lives of gay men and women—in all, “one of the most disturbing hours of my life,” said one reporter present. Ashburn, said to be “right of Rush Limbaugh,” has opposed every gay rights initiative that’s crossed his Senate desk, including measures aiming at fairness in jobs and housing, and one to protect gay youth.
Fast-forward to March 3 of this year, when a drunk-driving arrest near the Sacramento gay club Faces led him to announce, days later, to Kern County radio listeners: “I am gay.” Even north of the border you could practically hear the collective slap! as Republican hands met foreheads.
The gay Republican outed by scandal is, by now, a familiar event on the American political calendar. As Out magazine describes modern, gay Washington, Democrats live openly on the Hill and in K Street lobbying firms while their Republican counterparts “still cower in the closet until they trip themselves up with off-colour instant messages to teenage pages or conduct unbecoming to a United States senator in an airport bathroom.”
Why demonize gay people in the first place? “Beats me,” says Wellesley College political theorist, Laura Grattan. Surely, she adds, there’s self-hatred or overcompensation going on—“they could take a stand against gay rights without being so publicly vitriolic about it.” Whether railing loudly against gay rights is a shield, a political ruse to win votes or an attempt to scare it out of their systems, the result is clear: ritual outings and public embarrassment—though on that score, Ashburn’s glassy-eyed mug shot barely registers.
Remember Larry Craig, the Idaho senator who in 2007 pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after his arrest for soliciting sex in a Minneapolis airport washroom? Or state Rep. Bob Allen, deemed one of Florida’s most homophobic politicians, who faced the same charges one month later? (His defence: he’d offered to perform oral sex for $20, he said, because he’d been intimidated by the undercover officer, a black man.)
And a month after that, Richard Curtis, a state representative from Washington, another anti-gay, “family values” Republican, stepped down amid allegations he’d solicited gay sex. His seamy police report made Craig look angelic. In 2006, Florida congressman Mark Foley was also forced to step down after reports of inappropriate conduct with male pages surfaced—a scandal that came hard on the heels of the Ted Haggard bombshell. The New Life Church pastor was never elected to public office, but until a male escort alleged a three-year relationship (and meth-fuelled romps), Haggard had been among the country’s most influential Christian conservatives; for a time, he’d reportedly met weekly with then-president George W. Bush.
...Charles Moran, national spokesperson for the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay and lesbian grassroots Republican organization, assured Maclean’s the GOP is moving away from a “negative, hate-based” feel for its gay membership. Polling data, however, suggests otherwise.
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http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/03/23/it%E2%80%99s-the-last-closet-on-the-right/
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