Accuracy In Media editor Cliff Kincaid believes the Foley scandal is the price Republicans have paid for pretending that gay sickos can actually be real Republicans:
The complex nature of the “dirty trick” against the Republicans over the Mark Foley scandal is beginning to emerge. It doesn’t involve a George Soros-funded group or emails that had been in the possession of the media or shopped around by Democratic operatives. Instead, the GOP has played a trick on itself. The party brought so-called gay Republicans into positions of power in Congress only to realize that the confidential information they held about a secret gay network was political dynamite that could backfire.
At this point in the scandal, the issue is not whether there was such a network, but how big it is. CBS Evening News correspondent Gloria Borger reported the emerging belief that “a group of high-level gay Republican staffers were protecting” Foley. A New York Times story by Mark Leibovich confirmed that gay Republicans have occupied “crucial staff positions” in Congress and “have played decisive roles in passing legislation, running campaigns and advancing careers.”
The mystery man at the center of the scandal, Jeff Trandahl, is supposed to be a “lifelong Republican” who is gay. But Trandahl, who supervised the congressional page program as House clerk and knew about the controversial Foley emails many years ago, has a strange way of showing his Republicanism. A search of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records over the last six years shows no financial contributions to the Republican Party or Republican candidates. Instead, Trandahl in 2000 gave $1,200 to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which gives over 80 percent of its political campaign money to Democrats. Trandahl is so much of a Republican that he joined the board of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, another gay political action committee that commits most of its funds to electing Democrats. Its latest list of “winning candidates” is all Democrats, except for Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who admits not voting for President Bush in 2004.
If you are getting the idea that gay Republicans may be closeted Democrats, then you are beginning to understand how the Mark Foley scandal could have been a Democratic Party dirty trick.
In response to the scandal, a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans, a homosexual activist group, has been on cable channels like CNN and MSNBC expressing the fear that the Foley scandal will be used to root out homosexual influence in the Republican Party. But the Log Cabin Republicans are so Republican that its board voted 22-2 against endorsing President Bush in 2004 because of his stand against homosexual marriage.
So if the gay Republicans are not really Republicans, what are they? One veteran observer of this network told AIM that the Foley scandal should make it crystal clear that the gay Republicans are in reality “liberal activists” who want to use the party to advance the same homosexual agenda embraced by the Democrats.
The conspiracy is revealed! And it was so obvious, too!
Who would have thought that gay people who agreed with the Republicans on more issues more often than they agreed with Democrats would nonetheless work on behalf of broadened rights for gay people? And they refuse to endorse a president who is actively working against their interests by pandering to anti-gay prejudice? How dare they?!
Articles like this one by Kinkaid reinforce the view that Republicans are closed minded bigots, making it harder to persuade moderates to vote for the party’s candidates. Come to think of it, maybe AIM is a Democratic Party dirty trick? It would certainly explain a lot.
UPDATE: Max Blumenthal predicts “The Coming Gay Republican Purge” at the Nation‘s website. It would appear that Kinkaid isn’t the only one wearing a hat crafted of pink tinfoil.
Immediately after the Mark Foley scandal broke, some anti-Republican gay-rights activists composed a memo containing the names of closeted gay Republican Congressional staffers and sent it to leading Christian-right advocacy groups. The founder and chairman of one of those groups, the Rev. Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, told me he has received that memo, which he referred to simply as “The List.” Based on The List’s contents, Wildmon is convinced that a secretive gay “clique” boring within the Republican-controlled Congress is responsible for covering up Foley’s sexual predation toward teenage male House pages. Moreover, Wildmon calls on the Republican Party leadership to promptly purge the “subversive” gay staffers.
“They oughtta fire every one of ’em,” Wildmon told me in his trademark Mississippi drawl. “I don’t care if they’re heterosexual or homosexual or whatever they are. If you’ve got that going on, that subverts the will of the people; that subverts the voters. That is subversive activity. There should be no organization among staffers in Washington of that nature, and if they find out that they’re there and they’re a member, they oughtta be dismissed el pronto.”
Wildmon claimed that an investigation by Congressional Republican leaders into the gay menace lurking in their midst will clear House Speaker Dennis Hastert of allegations that he repeatedly ignored warnings about Foley’s behavior. “I think the identification of the members of the homosexual clique is going to come out,” Wildmon declared. “I think it’s going to come out whether or not Hastert knew what he says, and at this point I’m inclined to believe he’s telling the truth. I’m beginning to think that the homosexuals shielded their former Congressman Foley and that Denny Hastert did not know the depth of what’s going on up there.”
John Aravosis, a gay Democrat who admits to being a Democrat–which shows just how clever these people are–thinks the likes of Kinkaid and Wildmon are just jealous:
Because while gay and lesbian Americans have been increasingly welcomed into the fabric of the American family, including the Republican party, the religious right has increasingly exposed itself as a fringe movement of hateful bigots, and nobody likes them anymore.
While the Republicans are unparalleled in their ability to gay-bait, Latino-bait, black-bait, Muslim-bait, France-bait, and woman-bait, few of them really mean it. Most Republicans don’t give a damn about the religious right agenda. In fact, they hate it. I know more than a few Republicans in town, several of them downright conservative, and I can’t find a one who has a good word to say about any of the religious right hate groups or their deluded, hate-filled followers. In fact, they find them kind of nutty and obnoxious.
And, I should note, the vast majority of conservative religious Republicans do, too.
Hilzoy thinks Kinkaid is falling into a trap that has already snared many Democrats:
[Taking] the view that all gays are Democrats, more or less in virtue of being gay. This is a view that I normally associate with Democrats, and I normally try to discourage it, thinking that it must be rough to be someone who is both gay and sympathetic to the Republican party’s other positions, and that any such person presumably knows all about the Republican party’s track record on gay issues, and does not need the rest of us to lecture him or her, or to indulge our stereotypes at his or her expense.
