The White Peril 白禍

This is one of the reasons I have issues with outing as a political tactic: Andrew Sullivan reports that a Virginia congressman, Ed Schrock, is dropping out of the election in his district over allegations that he's gay. It's hard to imagine that he'd be bowing out of the race if he were not gay; but you never know what's going through people's heads, and this just happened yesterday. The stuff at BlogActive does look pretty ethically damning, if it's all legit. The Christian Coalition doesn't give you a 92% rating if all you do is fail to support gay marriage, you know. But the only specific accusation (on the posts I looked at) is the part about ending "Don't ask, don't tell" for the purpose of rooting out the queers before they're able to enlist.

Where I get queasy about this stuff is at the point at which someone has to decide what "rights" are, because that's the only way to determine whether someone's legislative record on our "rights" is in conflict with his personal conduct. I don't consider marriage a right; indeed, as people are currently campaigning for it, I don't support gay marriage. Therefore, if someone supports legislation against gay marriage but engages in homosexual conduct, I don't see the necessary conflict. I do support the end of "Don't ask, don't tell"--yeah, right, tell me gay recruits would be rejected in the sort of last-ditch exigency with which conservatives most persuasively argue about unit cohesion. There's no word that Schrock was sexually active with men while in the armed forces, though. If everything about Schrock is true, I can't pretend not to be glad he's going down (so to speak). If nothing more than what BlogActive has published is true, though, I can't see any ethical grounds for outing him. There's no defense for exposing people's private lives unless they're breaking laws that they themselves have championed; mere hypocrisy is not a crime.

Added on 1 September: While editing the above for clarity, I may as well point out that Right Side of the Rainbow has a nicely pitched take on this, expressing awareness of the ethical problems with outing while warning conservatives who lead double lives that, in practical terms, they're not likely to be able to play both ends against the middle for long.

The Washington Blade has an editorial from NY Blade editor Steve Weinstein, effusing to Jim McGreevey about the lovely new life he's about to embark on. It's annoying as hell--the editorial, I mean. How annoying McGreevey's life is going to be, I don't know. Things don't look to be smooth in the short-term, though, and he's got the potential to stick around and annoy us for a while yet.

Weinstein does give the obligatory acknowledgement that not all gays are rich and effete...

Coming out is never easy. Whether you�re a privileged WASP, growing up in luxury in suburban Connecticut, or a poor kid struggling in the projects, the process always involves a lot of self-searching.

...but his vision of gay life is thus:

Now comes the good part. The one thing they never told you about, what you couldn�t have envisioned all those years you were striving to be something you�re not, is that being gay is fun.

Yes, it�s true. You know those guys on �Queer Eye for the Straight Guy�? We�re really like that! We really do drive cool cars. We have great taste in clothes. We decorate our homes with beautiful objects. We eat exquisite food. We know which wine goes with which dish. We know how to dance � and do we ever enjoy dancing.

Developing your Inner Gay will take some time. Be patient. Rome wasn�t built in a day � and neither will your wardrobe. [Clunk! I guess our prose, unlike our clothing, isn't always so cool or beautiful.--SRK] Anyway, you�re already one step ahead: You obviously work out.

Your one-stop shopping source for gay stereotypes, that Steve Weinstein is. By my reckoning, he's neglected only to tell McGreevey to buy a cat. And despite his invocation of central-casting Connecticut WASP's and people who live in housing projects, he appears to know nothing about the larger American middle. Those of us who grew up there weren't told that gay life isn't fun, in the clotheshorse, disco-hopping, witty-sarcasm-at-dinner-parties way. We were told that that's all it is.

Look, I have to acknowledge that the profile above is one that fits me pretty squarely. Well, I dress nothing like the guys on Queer Eye. And I'm not the see-and-be-seen resort type. And most of what I eat is my own cooking, about the exquisiteness of which it would be unseemly for me to make pronouncements. But anyway, I like what my working-class relatives call "nice things" and am glad to be able to afford them.

Given McGreevey's background, what Weinstein describes is the kind of existence he seems likely to opt for, too. But making gay life in its totality sound like some sort of country club--for once, the lefty warnings to acknowledge "diversity" seem to fit--is insulting to guys who are perfectly happy being gay even though they don't dance, don't care about clothes, and wouldn't know a jar of pesto if it fell out of the sky and bonked them on the head. What's fun...well, not always fun, but good and right...about gay life is the ability to enjoy and care for our friends and loves without having to skulk around about it. You don't have to set foot on Fire Island for that.

Now, that's something. It's one thing for the Cheneys to talk about gay issues at a campaign stop--everyone knows their daughter is a lesbian, even if they don't make a big deal out of it. But Cheney's apparently going to appear in an HRC ad:

The ad will air next week during the convention in New York media.

It features portions of Cheney's remarks on gay marriage and ends with an announcer saying "He spoke from the heart for millions of parents. Discrimination is wrong. What if it was your child, Mr. President?"

There's a link to the ad in Windows Media format (which I can't get to work, even when I open it in IE instead of Firefox). This is weird timing, to say the least. It makes me wonder whether those people who've been suggesting that Cheney will be gently pushed aside for another nominee are on to something.

PS: Couldn't they get some gay guy who works in education or publishing to proofread that final, climactic, and errant use of the counterfactual? Sheesh.

So everyone from IGF to the expected gay blogger types to Virginia Postrel is talking about Vice-President Cheney's remarks about gay unions the other day. Some people are also reminding us of President Bush's statements on the only 3.5 seconds of Larry King Live in recent memory that haven't been devoted to Laci Peterson or Lori Hacking.

Apparently, there's some sort of inconsistency somewhere. Personally, I don't get it.

"That's up to states," Bush told CNN's Larry King Thursday night. "If they want to provide legal protections for gays, that's great. That's fine. But I do not want to change the definition of marriage. I don't think our country should."

When asked about federal benefits for same-sex couples Bush pointed to inheritance taxes which are lower for people who are married Bush said gays should support Republican moves to get of inheritance taxes altogether.

And here's Cheney:

"My general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want," Cheney, 63, said in response to a question at a campaign "town hall" meeting in Davenport, Iowa.

Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian and works for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said during the 2000 presidential race that he held homosexual marriage to be a state issue.

...

"I made clear four years ago when I ran and this question came up in the debate I had with Joe Lieberman that my view was that that's appropriately a matter for the states to decide, that that's how it ought to best be handled," Cheney said.

"But the president makes basic policy for the administration. And he's made it clear that he does in fact support a constitutional amendment on this issue," he added.

I've spent my whole adult life around people who say whatever's politically expedient at the time and force you to sift through every statement, flicker of an expression, and chance unstudied gesture to figure out what they really believe. I don't think I'm too naive to go looking for those hidden meanings when they're likely to be there.

But this strikes me as pretty straightforward. Neither Bush nor Cheney talks about not wanting government policy to "encourage" or "condone" homosexuality, which seems to be the favored formulation for those conservatives who don't want us taken out and shot but are perfectly happy to make our relationships as hard to sustain as possible. As Christians, the President and Vice-President probably think that homosexual behavior is wrong. But there's nothing to make that necessarily incompatible with thinking American gays who form long-term relationships should be able to take care of each other without interference.

Of course they're both treading carefully in political terms. That's what happens when an issue is made during an election year of something that's deeply controversial. I wish, based on my beliefs, that Bush hadn't supported the FMA; furthermore, I don't think he needed to, given what I can figure out of his own position.

His deciding that he did need to, though, wasn't clear evidence of illogic or a cowardly cave-in to the religious right. Every homosexual public figure that's twitched in the last year, it seems, has invoked "second-class citizenship" to characterize what people who oppose gay marriage want for us, with no middle ground. In that context, I'm almost grateful to Bush and Cheney for being willing to take on the subject in public at all, even if they are watching their backs politically.

Added on 28 August: Ann Althouse summarizes pretty well, I think, what we can glean from this recent clutch of soundbites about what the candidates think of gay marriage. Basically, even those against the FMA oppose it (of course, we don't seem to be hearing from Edwards about this).

Added five minutes later after avoiding impulse to put posthole digger through monitor: Flamin' Norah! I turned off TrackBack auto-discovery the other day, and when I posted this, no pings went through. Golden. Now I republish and the poltergeists decide they're going to ping five people. それって何のことだろうッ？！

Is Golan Cipel hot? That's not a rhetorical question that ends with an implied "or what, baby-baby!" I mean, you look at some photographs, and you're like, Hello! This dude really needs to do a photo session with Kobi Israel, barechested and sitting on a mattress (no sheets--just the ticking) and maybe eating a handful of sloppy joe from a paper plate.

Okay, fine. You've got a picture of two guys in dinner jackets who look as if they're going to start making out as soon as the photographer leaves. I'd probably be hot for William Demarest if you caught him in that kind of pose.

Even so, there are others that are like...okay, David Byrne with a little more meat on him and not so bug-eyed. Maybe I kind of see it. But couldn't the Gov. find someone to fill that bill in Bergen County?

A visitor from Susanna Cornett's site sent me a very polite inquiry about this story from down her way:

When Mike Johnson, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, which represents conservative politicians and "pro-family" organizations, called Rawls a "homosexual," Rawls charged at Johnson. Rawls' voice rose and his face turned red, and he approached Johnson, pointed his finger at him and labeled him a "homophobe."

"I am not a homosexual," Rawls angrily told Johnson. "I am a gay man."

Rawls considers the term "homosexual" derogatory. "No one calls me the 'h' word," he said later.

Johnson said Rawls had berated him earlier that morning by calling him a member of the "radical, religious right" in a television debate they taped to be aired Sunday on WDSU-TV.

"He just went nuts. I was shocked by it," Johnson said of the courtroom encounter. "He lunged at me because I used the word 'homosexual.' I thought that was an appropriate term, I didn't know it was derogatory."

I wish this surprised me, but it doesn't particularly. It just happens to be the gay version of one of the most unpleasant features of contemporary American culture: the practice of fantasizing into existence one's own arbitrary system of etiquette and then going ballistic on people who unwittingly violate it. Janis Gore, who kindly gave me the link to the original story and then to her own take on it, sensibly says,

When did the term 'homosexual' become derogatory? 'Homo' has never been a neutral word, but 'homosexual' is a descriptive term, like its siblings 'heterosexual', 'bisexual' and 'asexual', isn't it?

It is a bit more complicated than that. One sometimes hears social conservatives proclaim that they refuse to use gay to mean "homosexual" because they're standing firm against the corruption of a useful word without any good equivalent. I find that explanation improbable. Considering their presumed civic-mindedness about the usage of our great native tongue, such people don't seem to get around to complaining much about the slipshod way people use infer/imply, or disinterested/uninterested, or momentarily/in a moment. And I have a funny feeling that when the slang use of gay to mean "homosexual" had connotations of promiscuity and chirpy light-in-the-loaferness, they might not have been such sticklers. What does seem to irritate them is that, unlike the medical homosexual, gay is neutral and doesn't retain even a trace of pathological implications.

I've been known to call such people on what I see as their disingenuousness--most of them don't exactly try to hide their disapproval of homosexuality, so why they need to make a great show of language persnicketiness to dress up this particular aspect of it is beyond me--but I don't really care what word they use as long as they don't try to keep me off my man. I probably reach for the word gay more often than I do homosexual, but on this site, I yak about gay stuff so frequently that if I didn't have more than one word to choose from, I'd start to sound like a broken record. Come to think of it, when I'm feeling especially playful or nettled, I throw the word fag around quite a bit. I think I've used invert here once or twice, too.

So Rawls's reaction doesn't make much sense to me, but some people will never miss a chance to work themselves into a froth of indignation. One might actually dispute his use of the word homophobia to characterize someone who wasn't expressing any skittishness, let alone irrational fear and hatred, toward homosexuality. But I can understand why Johnson either was too shocked to do so or just figured it was best to let the matter drop.

Added on 22 August: Mike A. from Ex-Gay Watch has a post relevant to the topic here that links to the predictable reaction to Rawls's outburst by World Net Daily.

The requisite Jonathan Rauch piece about the McGreevey resignation is up at The New York Times. As is frequently the case lately, I agree wholeheartedly with about 80% of what he writes and have reservations about the other 20%. Rauch thinks that the bizarre circumstances surrounding McGreevey's climactic announcement make the whole thing so weird that it won't really affect gay advocacy, but he himself can't resist taking the opportunity to use it to plug for gay marriage. Here's the middle of the article:

I coped by struggling for years to suppress every sexual and romantic urge. I convinced myself that I could never love anybody, until the strain of denial became too much to bear.

Others coped differently. Some threw themselves into rebellion against marriage and the bourgeois norms it seemed to represent. Some, to their credit, built firmly coupled gay lives without the social support and investment that marriage brings. And some, determined to lead "normal" lives (meaning, largely, married lives), married.

At what point Mr. McGreevey realized and acknowledged he was gay I don't know. I do know that many gay husbands begin by denying and end by deceiving. Perhaps that was so in his case.

That's a nicely even-tempered way of putting it. But given that this is an op-ed, in which opinions and editorializing are expected, is it too much to ask for even a parenthetical acknowledgement that the kind of coping that involves long-term deception is wrong?

It's true that we don't know exactly when McGreevey realized he was a gay American [Cue: Rapturous applause by assembled press corps], but it appears that his sexuality has been pretty much an open secret for at least several years. No human being can make the best decision in every difficult circumstance he ever encounters. But even so, people don't just wake up one morning, after a lifetime of doing their best to live decently and honorably, to find that they have to deal with two sham marriages, accusations of cronyism and corruption, a possible sexual harassment lawsuit, and a sudden desire to resign as Governor of the ninth-most populous state in the Union. And while I understand that I don't know first-hand what life was like when the gay men and lesbians now in their 40's were my age and younger, the fact remains that 1979 was over some time ago. Fags get 365 days in a year just like everyone else; on any one of them before last week, McGreevey could have faced up to reality and started being honest.

In other words, if the accusations against him are true, McGreevey's problem is self-centeredness. That's a character flaw that, to coin a phrase, does not discriminate based on sexual orientation--as the reality of sex and corruption scandals among straight politicians attests. Nevertheless, the craftily self-serving among us gays have learned that they can get sympathy by playing the emotional-upheaval card when their misdeeds catch up with them.

It's a poor idea to abet such a maneuver. I think McGreevey's case makes an excellent argument for being honest with yourself and others, conquering your fears, and coming out of the closet sooner rather than later; it does not help the argument that gays are responsible enough for marriage.

Note: I guess I should point out that I know the reporters actually at his press conference weren't applauding; it was apparently the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Classical Values did comment on the McGreevey thing, including the gay angle, overnight:

Tell me about my generation! I am three years older than McGreevey, I came of age in the 1970s.

The 1970s, folks! Free love, wild parties, orgying, and coming out of the closet.

Well, that needs to be qualified some. My parents were born in 1948 and 1951, and while they listened to psychedelic rock and played in cover bands after high school (that's how they met), they and their friends weren't orgying. The cultural eras called the '60's and '70's certainly happened, but they didn't happen equally everywhere in America.

Still and all, it sure is interesting that, until this week, McGreevey's choices in dealing with his "lifelong turmoil" always just happened to come down on the side of preserving his access to power and money. Even in small towns and conservative religious families, there are self-aware, self-critical people who are willing to come out and take the hit for it--before they end up with a line of spouses, children, conniving lovers, and shady wheeler-dealers to cope with when they're pushing 50.

When you live in Tokyo, you're the first to find out when there's an accident at a Japanese nuclear facility and the last to find out when the Governor of New Jersey comes out and announces his resignation.

Every gay guy linked to the left of this page, along with many others besides, has offered an opinion (well, not Eric at Classical Values, though I'd be interested to hear what he thinks). I think the one I agree with most is Agenda Bender, who wants to restore sexual purity and discretion to the Governorship of New Jersey by taking it over himself. I'll campaign for him.

But seriously, looking at the transcript of the speech, I worry:

I am also here today because, shamefully, I engaged in adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony. It was wrong. It was foolish. It was inexcusable.

And for this, I ask the forgiveness and the grace of my wife.

Discount Blogger says that yesterday's press conference may, not surprisingly, be a defensive move against coming charges of misconduct in office. We don't know yet. But just taking what the Governor said at face value, I have to wonder at some people's reactions. I don't see how McGreevey's speech can be construed as saying that gays are unfit for office. I also don't think that the pressure to be closeted, which I detest as much as any out homosexual, can be summarily blamed (though Right Side of the Rainbow does imply that McGreevey made a bad choice in a bad situation).

One of the arguments most gay marriage advocates use is that it would help keep gay guys from screwing around on their partners. McGreevey--looking at the content of his speech and leaving aside his sincerity, which we can't assess--believes that it was wrong to break his vows and screw around on his partner. Shouldn't people who think gay and straight relationships should be taken equally seriously be paying attention to that part, too?

Given what he says about the pain caused to his wife, it does not appear that she was the sort who agrees to look the other way while her husband picks up a guy every few weeks to keep the jones from driving him crazy. Pointing out that, in a better world, none of this would have had to happen...that's fine. But McGreevey accepted responsibility for a marriage and child, and he wants to avoid piling public scandal on top of private upheaval. If he believes that's more important than proving that out gay men can be respectable politicians, I have a hard time thinking ill of him for it. We'll see what happens.

There's apparently a great deal of self-deception going around over the upcoming election. A few weeks back, Virginia Postrel chided libertarians about citing Bush's betrayal of free trade principles as a reason to vote for Kerry. Everybody and his grandmother thinks Andrew Sullivan is being soft on Kerry because he feels spurned by Bush.

Contrariwise, Michael Demmons says Boi from Troy is delusional for comparing Bush-Cheney favorably to other Republican presidential tickets on gay rights. And Dale Carpenter has a piece up at IGF about the nerve-abrading contortions of gay Democrats at and after the convention--a topic that's been flogged lifeless by others but that Carprenter treats with characteristic point and clarity:

What to make of the Boston Democrats? They really like gay people, but they'd really rather the American public didn't know that. And what of gay Democrats? They're high-minded idealists when they criticize gay Republicans for working within a party that doesn't much like gays; but they're sober-minded pragmatists when assessing their own party's treatment of gays. Yes, they acknowledge, the Boston convention was a retreat from gay visibility at past conventions. But, they quickly add, that's necessary to defeat the evil Republicans.

Kerry announced his obligatory respect for diversity in language so general President Bush himself could have used it. He also tried to undermine Republican moralism by claiming to support �family values,� which for Democrats means raising taxes to pay for social programs and government-controlled health care.

Then there was Kerry's promise not to �misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.� This passage caused much mirth among gay Democrats, who clung to it as possibly a reference to the Bush-supported Federal Marriage Amendment. That's certainly a reasonable interpretation, and no doubt it's what Kerry wanted gay Americans to understand it to mean.

But, in context, it was oblique. To the casual listener, who heard Kerry denounce Attorney General John Ashcroft, it could have been understood as a critique of the Bush administration's overall record on civil liberties. And, since neither Kerry nor Edwards could be bothered to show up to actually vote against the FMA, why give them the benefit of the interpretive doubt?

I agree. But I have to ask the pro-gay marriage people (including Carpenter, who I don't think is being willfully disingenuous but doesn't address this point), didn't you see this coming even a little bit? For the last year or so, advocates of gay marriage have been hammering at us that straight people who oppose it plainly want to relegate homosexuals to second-class citizenship and that we gays who don't support it plainly aren't self-respecting and are content to be marginalized.

They sure as hell succeeded at getting the issue on the table. You can't gainsay that point. But they also succeeded at making people think of gay marriage as the issue that drives gay advocacy. Now we have the predictable result: The last thing politicians trying to cobble together blocs of diverse voters in close contests need is to start yapping about a divisive issue, so they're playing it safe. And playing it safe in this environment means avoiding mention of not just gay marriage but basic inclusiveness towards gays, now that a lot of people have been pummeled into linking them. The alloy of general blind partisan loyalty and specific anyone-but-Bush loathing from which many gay Democrats are cast means that Kerry can string them along and Bush has no reason not to keep his distance.

I've talked mostly about gay marriage here (for a change, huh?), but I could go off on trade policy, too--and I say that as the son of a steelworker. And then there's that multi-front war and national security whatchamacalit that's going on. Most of us aren't going to be all that happy about the choices we make when we cast our ballots in November, and I can't fault people for getting gretzy about that. It's the creeping tone of enervation and oh-whatever grasping at straws that rattles me. Wondering whether we're at a tipping point before things really go downhill is possibly unavoidable, but we have to stay in the game. We didn't choose to be the people who are enfranchised at this point in history, but we are, and it's our job. We still have thousands of soldiers and a handful of international allies who are willing to put themselves on the line for what we believe in. Not to mention the people who are going to come after us. It's not too much to ask that we stay actively, publicly enthusiastic about what we know to be true and valuable and keep actively, publicly looking for every way, major and minor, to put it into practice. Even if things do go from bad to worse, there will come a time years and years from now when people will want to rebuild what we've been enjoying. We owe it to them to leave behind as much guidance as possible.

Now, about that election--will anyone be terribly put out if I write in Bill the Cat?

Amritas has a post up today about Japanese-Americans who are clinging like death to their connection to Japan as a way to feel as if their pampered suburban lives are really records of noble struggle.

It seems to be a good week to be aggrieved. One Ryan Joseph Kim has an article on advocate.com about some recent gay and Asian references in pop culture:

A few months ago Details, the metrosexual men�s magazine, ran a feature called �Gay or Asian?� as part of its regular section that points out the similarities between gay male stereotypes and other cultural stereotypes. But unlike in previous issues, with features such as �Gay or Eurotrash?� and �Gay or Jesus?� that ran with little to no complaint, the magazine was surprised to see thousands of angry e-mails from subscribers and activists criticizing their latest choice.

�Gay or Asian?� sparked a rare fury not only from the gay community and the gay Asian community but the larger Asian community as well.

Wow. A whole Venn diagram's worth of people who need to get lives.

I mean, really. In 2004, what--what the flipping, confounded, dad-blamed, bloody blue blazes--can possibly be considered "rare" about a hail of furious missives from put-out "activists" over thus-and-so PC infraction? Presumably, Christians were able to figure out that a feature called "Gay or Jesus?"--while probably not a consummate expression of piety, and perhaps not in the best taste--was just mischievous, good-natured fun. Maybe there's a lesson there.

Fine, I'm probably overreacting. But you hear stuff like this all the time:

Because of this underrepresentation, any depiction is crucial to either confirming or destroying common stereotypes. When Details compares the stereotypical gay male and the stereotypical Asian male by writing �one cruises for chicken; the other takes it General Tso�style,� it isn�t just a harmless joke�there�s nothing on TV or in the movies to counterbalance that point. The satire, the very title of which suggests that one cannot be gay and Asian, could well have shaped the only image that a reader has of Asian-Americans.

Maybe metrosexuals aren't quite as worldly as their reputation would imply. But can anyone seriously believe that adult readers are going to form immutable conclusions about an entire race based on a single limp pun on the word chicken? Or that no Asian-Americans are gay?

I know, I know. If I let myself go bananas over every piece of garbage like this, I'll be ready for the funny farm in no time. The reason this sort of thing sets me off is that yesterday, for the first time in a while, I went to the same site and found this article by summer intern Steven Harbaugh:

Whenever I tell Angelenos I�m from Ohio, they assume that I am less cultured or don�t know how gay life really is until I�ve gone club hopping to every sex-slathered West Hollywood bar.

I�ve been to rural, scary parts of West Virginia. I know there are lots of places where gay people aren�t accepted. I�ve been to one of the few gay clubs near West Virginia University, where they�re still playing the Village People as if they�re cool. I know there are places where gay culture and acceptance is behind the times. But it�s not like that everywhere in the Midwest.

There are communities of gays and lesbians throughout America�not just in larger, metropolitan cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. There are gay families and couples living in sparsely populated rural towns�not just in the gay-friendly communities. We�re everywhere. And everywhere (including in Los Angeles), there are still bigots.

This guy is talking about real, clueless assumptions by real, clueless people. And while it clearly upsets him that they behave as they do, he's able to talk about it without sounding as if he were ready to burst into tears the next time someone asks how far his childhood house was from the nearest cornfield. Good on him. Combating stereotypes is important because they're often used to pigeonhole people who don't fit them, but not because upending people's expectations is some sort of sacred value in itself. Permanently changing the way people think takes time, and the best way to do it is to be who you are, without being apologetic or defensive. Getting angry over every manifestation of stereotypes in our kaleidoscopic popular culture is not a good way to keep from sounding defensive.

The Human Rights Campaign has endorsed Arlen Specter's Democratic opponent in the contest for his Senate seat, IGF reports. I've never been all that hot on Specter, who's very much a finger-to-the-wind Washington operator. When his breaking ranks with the Republicans is motivated by principled disagreement is hard to get a handle on.

But come on. If the HRC is going to play single-issue politics--and being a single-issue lobby, it has no reason not to--not endorsing Specter strikes me as plain dumb in strategic terms. It's possible that Joseph Hoeffel supports a few more HRC wish list items, certainly, but Specter is a four-term senator with connections everywhere. A lot of hard-right types don't like him (my Representative, Pat Toomey, was his challenger in the primary), but he still has credibility as a pro-gay centrist that most Democrats lack.

BTW, I've been kind of lazy about reading up on Hoeffel as a candidate. His homepage as a Representative is about what you'd expect:

Now in his third term, Joe has worked hard on promoting fiscal restraint, balancing the federal budget, paying down our national debt, reforming education, improving international relations, protecting the environment and expanding health care.

I bet he thinks puppies are adorable, too.

Naturally, his vague desire to balance the federal budget should not obscure his specific accomplishments, which mostly involve making sure that Northeast Philadelphia gets as much of that lovely pork and gravy as possible:

Joe has worked hard to bring federal money back to Montgomery County, including over $50 million in his first term alone. He brought a public health center to Norristown; secured millions of dollars in SEPTA funding; brought $2 million to regional private colleges to establish a program to train public school teachers; helped establish the Center for Sustainable Development at Temple University-Ambler with a federal grant of $2 million; and helped restore $3 million in Title I education funds to Montgomery County school districts.

In the most recent appropriations cycle, Joe secured funds for the Schuylkill Valley Metro, development of the Delaware River waterfront in Northeast Philadelphia, Montgomery County Community College, Manor College and the Abington Art Center among others.

(Slight pause while I suppress my gorge at the casual mention of such a thing as "the most recent appropriations cycle," in which federal money is poured into waterfront development. Glp. There. We're good.) Being such a friend of gays and lesbians that it's worth throwing over one of our strategic Senate allies for him, couldn't he have worked in a new LGBTXYZPDQ community center complex somewhere in there? Exposed brick, atrium, and restful orchid garden would be welcome features, but I'd settle for the atrium. After all, we're trying to practice fiscal restraint here.

So I finally decided that, rather than clicking through to half the sites I read from Dean Esmay's page, I may as well take the trouble to update my link list so I can actually get other places from here. Of course, the operation was fraught with hazard. Have I mentioned lately how much I detest default smart quotes? I forgot that Word has that particular annoying feature, so of course, when I hand-coded the links in a Word document and then cut and pasted into my site, MT was like, WTF is that junk in your href tags? Sigh. You'd think, as someone who's spent his whole working life negotiating between word processing and DTP programs in English and Japanese, I'd remember how that little stuff can screw up your life. These two-byte characters are going to drive me to drink.

Or maybe there's hope. In the course of getting my links together, I was reminded of this report on IGF that Teresa Heinz Kerry...well, here's the citation from The Washington Blade:

Heinz Kerry appeared to mix policy issues with motherly love, drawing repeated shouts of appreciation from both lesbians and gay male delegates. She told of how she was moved at a campaign appearance a few months ago in Washington state, when a man told her in a question and answer session that his relationship with his mother was strained and told her, "I want you to be my mother."

"It was clear that he had not made that peace with his mother and he wanted someone who loved him," Heinz Kerry said. "And so, at least, if nothing else, you'll have a mom in the White House," she told the crowd. Added Heinz Kerry, "You can call me Mama T."

That remark prompted the gay delegates to jump to their feet while chanting, "Mama T!"

Cool! I know what let's do. Let's have La Ketchup address each of us as "Little Mary," which not only has a reassuring ring of protectiveness but is also the name of Virginia Weidler's character in The Women! Doesn't get much gayer than that.

Cheese and crackers. I normally think the word codependent an especially annoying neologism, but I can't think of anything better to describe a room full of grown men and women who are begging to be patronized and a woman who's only too glad to win their affection by doing it. Time to find a new shrink, ladies.

(You, too, Mrs. K. Mama T.)