As Craig’s steadfast insistence on his heterosexuality demonstrates, however, this isn’t going to happen. Instead, the conservative base — which, lest you forgot, is already hot and bothered about the creeping menace of gay marriage — now has yet another reason to fear the gays. Craig’s bathroom bust won’t make social conservatives realize that gays are people, too; it’ll just make them creeped out every time they walk by an airport men’s room.
And this brings us to the inherent limitation of the Mike Rogers approach. Given prevailing conservative attitudes toward gays and lesbians, journalists probably aren’t going to find many prominent Republicans who’ve quietly maintained healthy, long-term relationships with a partner of the same sex. They’re more likely to discover the Ted Haggards or Mike Foleys or Larry Craigs — individuals who’ve been forced to treat their sexuality as a dirty secret, and who, as a result, end up manifesting it in distinctly unhealthy ways. These same behaviors, of course, are ideally suited to reinforce conservative stereotypes of gay deviance. The Catholic Church’s response to its recent sex-abuse scandal is instructive here. The church could have concluded that its own opposition to homosexuality was part of the problem — that young gay Catholic men were trying to sublimate their sexuality by joining the clergy, and that some of them became sexual predators when this approach didn’t work. Instead, the Vatican reiterated the need to keep gays from becoming priests.
This doesn’t mean that what Larry Craig did in the bathroom at the Minneapolis airport wasn’t news. It obviously was. And given the mainstream press’s aspirations toward ideological neutrality, the possibility of media coverage bolstering conservative anti-gay sentiment might seem irrelevant. Still, even journalists who strive for total objectivity benefit from considering the real-world consequences of their work. And in cases like Craig’s, those consequences could be the exact opposite of what we expect.
On the Web
Adam Reilly's Media Log: http://www.thephoenix.com/medialog
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