But that may be changing. True, the Reverend Ted Haggard’s penchant for meth-fueled gay sex was first reported by Hustler, but it was ABC News that broke the story of former Republican congressman Mark Foley’s oversexed communications with young, male House pages. There may still be some timidity when it comes to reporting and publishing. But on a theoretical level, the mainstream media seems increasingly comfortable with the idea that anti-gay pols shouldn’t be safe in the closet. Witness the Times editorial page observing that Craig had been a “stalwart in the family-values caucus,” and speculating that he might “morph into a blatant hypocrite before the voters’ eyes” if he stayed in office.
Not everybody agrees — yet. “The private sphere remains under unrelenting assault from government and industry,” journalism professor Edward Wasserman wrote in the Miami Herald earlier this week. “[I]t’s a pity when the news media line up to lead the charge — under the banner of public interest.” But these dissenters may be fighting a losing battle.
All men aren’t created equal
As the Craig story played out, this focus on personal hypocrisy was accompanied, in liberal quarters, by an irate fascination with the GOP’s contrasting responses to Craig and David Vitter, the Louisiana senator whose phone number was found in a list maintained by the so-called DC Madam. Here’s a statement from Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:
Let’s see — one Republican senator is involved in soliciting sex from a man and the Republican leadership calls for a Senate investigation and yanks the rug from underneath him. Another Republican senator admits to soliciting the services of a female prostitute and there’s not only no investigation but the senator is greeted with a standing ovation by his Republican peers. What explains the starkly different responses? I’d say rank and homophobic hypocrisy.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald noted another explanation: Craig’s successor will be appointed by Idaho’s Republican governor, while Vitter (if he’d resigned) would have had his replacement picked by a Democrat. But Greenwald, too, was outraged by the cultural double-standard. “[T]his inconsistency is obviously attributable to both anti-gay animus and rank political self interest,” he wrote.
All of this raises two questions. First: didn’t we know this already? After all, it was Craig’s acceptance of the prevailing anti-gay Republican orthodoxy that attracted Rogers’s attention in the first place. No one who pays even passing attention to politics should be surprised that conservatives defended Vitter but threw Craig under the bus.
Second, and more important: when it comes to entrenched conservative homophobia, what effect is the massive media attention lavished on Craig likely to have? The best-case scenario, for social liberals, would probably involve Craig pulling a Jim McGreevy and identifying himself as a gay American (or a bisexual American, or an American man who has sex with men). Then, for good measure, he could give a stirring speech on the tension between the GOP’s current anti-gay shtick and true conservatism — a speech so moving, so utterly convincing, that two or three other Republican congressmen proudly announced that they were gay Americans, too.
