June 10, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Outing the Out of Touch
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Be honest. Who would you rather share a foxhole with:
a gay soldier or Mitt Romney?
A gay soldier, of course. In a dicey situation like
that, you need someone steadfast who knows who he is
and what he believes, even if he's not allowed to say
it out loud.
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as the
gloriously gay Oscar Wilde said. And gays are the
sacrifice that hypocritical Republican candidates
offer to placate "values" voters - even though some
candidates are not so finicky about morals regarding
their own affairs and divorces.
They may coo over the photo of Dick Cheney, whose
re-election campaign demonized gays, proudly smiling
with his new grandson, the first baby of his lesbian
daughter, Mary.
But they'll hold the line, by jiminy, against gay
Americans who are willing to die or be horribly
disfigured in the cursed Bush/Cheney war in Iraq.
Peter Pace, whose job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff became a casualty of Iraq on Friday, asserted
in March that homosexual acts "are immoral." Yet in
May, he wrote a letter to the judge in the Scooter
Libby case, pleading for leniency for the Cheney aide.
Scooter always looked for "the right way to proceed -
both legally and morally," General Pace wrote of the
man who lied to a grand jury about the outing of a
spy, after he pumped up the fake case for the war that
has claimed the lives of 3,500 young men and women
serving under the general.
At the G.O.P. debate in New Hampshire last week, the
contenders were more homophobic than the mobsters on
"The Sopranos," unanimously supporting the inane
"don't ask, don't tell" policy. Even Rudy Giuliani,
who loves to cross-dress and who stayed with old
friends, a gay couple, to avoid Gracie Mansion when
his second marriage was disintegrating, had an
antediluvian answer.
Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Arabic linguists
trained by the government who have been ousted from
the military after being outed.
Mr. Giuliani, who procured three deferments to avoid
Vietnam, replied that, with the war in Iraq raging,
"This is not the time to deal with disruptive issues
like this."
If he's so concerned with disruptive issues, maybe he
should start worrying about this one: Two straight
guys who slithered out of going to Vietnam are
devising a losing strategy in Iraq year after year. W.
and Dick Cheney have fouled things up so badly that
Robert Gates and Tony Snow are now pointing to South
Korea - where American troops have stayed for over
half a century - as a model.
Mitt Romney agreed with Rudy on the issue. Instead of
going to Vietnam, Mr. Romney spent two and a half
years doing Mormon missionary work in France. Isn't
that like doing Peace Corps work in Monte Carlo?
At the memorial for Mark Bingham, the gay 6-foot-5
rugby player who was on Flight 93 on 9/11, John McCain
said he might owe his life to the young man who helped
fight the hijackers, bringing down the plane aiming to
crash into the Capitol.
But Senator McCain wants gay troops to stay closeted.
The policy, he said, is "working." But it's not. The
Army in Iraq is like that exhausted nag Scarlett
O'Hara whipped on to Tara. Yet Republicans surge on,
even as they expel gays.
In a Times Op-Ed piece Friday, Stephen Benjamin, a gay
Arabic translator eager to go to Iraq, told how he was
dismissed when the Navy learned his status.
"Consider," he wrote. "More than 58 Arabic linguists
have been kicked out since 'don't ask, don't tell' was
instituted. How much valuable intelligence could those
men and women be providing today to troops in harm's
way?"
He noted that 11,000 other service members have been
shoved out since 1993 and speculated that if the Army
had not been so short of Arabic translators, the
cables that went untranslated on Sept. 10, 2001, might
have been translated, preventing 9/11.
In 2000, the British military began letting anyone who
served say if they were "a poof," as one squadron
leader put it. Sarah Lyall wrote in The Times that the
military reports that none of its fears "about
harassment, discord, blackmail, bullying or an erosion
of unit cohesion or military effectiveness have come
to pass."
America has been Will-and-Graced since Bill Clinton
had his kerfuffle on the issue in 1993. Tolerance has
blossomed, especially among younger Americans.
According to a Pew poll, 4-in-10 Americans say they
have close friends or relatives who are gay.
The Republican field seems stale and out of sync. They
should have listened to the inimitable Barry
Goldwater, who told it true: You don't have to be
straight to shoot straight.
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