The presence of homosexuals, particularly gay men, in crucial staff positions has been an enduring if largely hidden staple of Republican life for decades, and particularly in recent years. They have played decisive roles in passing legislation, running campaigns and advancing careers.
Foley Case Upsets Tough Balance by Capitol Hill’s Gay Republicans
By MARK LEIBOVICH
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 — Every month or so, 10 top staff members from Capitol Hill meet over dinner to commiserate about their uneasy experience as gay Republicans. In a wry reference to the “K Street Project,” the party’s campaign to build influence along the city’s lobbying corridor, they privately call themselves the “P Street Project,” a reference to a street cutting through a local gay enclave.
For many of those men and other gay Republicans in political Washington, reconciling their private lives and public roles has required a discreet existence. But in the last week, the Mark Foley scandal has upset that careful balance.
Since Representative Foley, Republican of Florida, resigned after sending sexually explicit electronic messages to male pages, gay Republicans in Washington have been under what one describes as “siege and suspicion.”
Some conservative groups blamed the “gay lifestyle” and the gathering force of the “gay agenda” for the scandal. Others equated homosexuality with pedophilia, a linkage that has long outraged gay men and lesbians.
Conservative blogs and Web sites pointed out that gay staff members played principal roles in investigating the Foley case, suggesting that the party was betrayed by gay men trying to hide misconduct by one of their own. Some gay activists even began circulating a document known as “The List,” a roster of gay Congressional staff members and their Republican bosses.
“You can see where it would be easy for some people to blame gays for something that might bring down the party in Congress,” said Brian Bennett, a gay Republican political consultant. He was a longtime chief of staff to former Representative Robert K. Dornan, Republican of California, who regularly referred to gays as “Sodomites.”
“I’m just waiting for someone in a position of authority to make this a gay issue,” Mr. Bennett said of the Foley case.
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Night of the Long Knives
These guys have done the bidding of their masters including tolerating, at least publicly, the efforts of their party to vilify, humiliate and denigrate them. Now some elements of this same party are attempting to throw them under the wheels of the Follies of Foley bus. What they don't seem to understand is that when you make a deal with the devil it is always on the devli's terms.
People like Brian Bennett are no less drunk and delusioned in their pursuit of power and prestige than their former bosses like Bob Dornan, who routinely made homophobic remarks. There is also something quite twisted and strange about the relationships between men like Dornan and Bennett.
I don't think I'm being paranoid when I suggest there are elements in these relationships that are analagous to the relationship between the Nazi Party and the SA or brownshirts. On a much lower frequency, Brian Bennett and others like him may be enroute to the Republican Party's version of the Night of the Long Knives.
The following was lifted from Wickipaedia:
Ernst Röhm was one of the most prominent of a number of early Nazi party members who was a suspected homosexual, and his homosexuality was ultimately the pretext used for his removal during the purge of the SA. Having been outed in 1925, however, Röhm made little attempt to hide his sexuality. Despite Hitler's pretense of shock upon discovering his deputy's sexual orientation, he had in fact long known that Röhm was homosexual (emphasis added).
During Röhm's tenure at the head of the SA, it has been suggested that a number of homosexual men (notably Karl Ernst, a former bouncer at a gay nightclub, and Edmund Heines) were appointed to and promoted within the SA as a result of high-level liaisons with powerful SA figures. This was despite the openly anti-gay policies of the Nazis, exemplified by their strengthening of Paragraph 175 (criminalising homosexual acts) of the German Criminal Code of 1871. (emphasis added)
These gentlemen are victims
These gentlemen are victims of a world they helped create.
Black Republicans should take note.Â