"Slandering gays through icky behavior: Is Sen. Craig part of a sneaky right-wing plot to confuse homosexuality with pedophilia, prostitution and public lewdness?"

By Steve Sanders

As published in the Chicago Sun-Times Sunday "Controversy" section, Sept. 2, 2007.

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Not long ago, the "family values" crowd thought the best way to oppose gay rights was to slander gay people.

To them, being gay was synonymous with behavior that was objectionable, anti-social or illegal. Republican politicians insisted that marriage had to be "defended" from gay couples. Paul Cameron, a "psychologist" whose junk science is still a staple of right-wing Web sites, has written that gay people are "sexual bums" who suffer from a "preoccupation with sex" and "seek excessive distraction" through sex, drugs and other risk-taking behaviors.

The political argument that followed from this picture was simple and insidious: Why should these people be allowed to marry one another, or be protected against hate crimes or job discrimination?

 But lately, it seems, Republicans and the religious right have stumbled onto something even more deviously effective. Rather than talking about icky behavior, they are modeling icky behavior, and forcing the rest of us to talk about it. Their antics practically guarantee that the media will discuss homosexuality in the same breath as pedophilia, prostitution and anonymous sexual encounters. This is an evil-genius political strategy worthy of Karl Rove.

Consider:

- Sen. Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican with a 100 percent rating from the American Family Association, unwittingly plays footsy with a cop, gets himself arrested, then goes on television to indignantly declare, "I am not gay!" The impression many Americans get: being gay means picking up men in bathrooms.

- Mark Foley, the former Florida Republican congressman, gets caught having racy online chats with teenage males, resigns from Congress, then blames his behavior on a drinking problem and checks into rehab. The message: gay men are pedophiles, and they deal with their messy, embarrassing lives by turning to alcohol. At best, they're to be pitied. At worst, they're creepy criminals.

- Ted Haggard, the evangelical minister disgraced by allegations by a male prostitute about illicit sex and methamphetamine use, undergoes religious "therapy" and is subsequently pronounced "completely heterosexual." The message: being gay is an illness that causes you to do drugs and hang out with hustlers.

The truth is that these behaviors are not about being gay (any more than Sen. David Vitter's patronage of the D.C. Madam was about being straight). If anything, they are about being closeted and repressed -- conditions that Republicans and many churches have encouraged by treating homosexuality as a source of shame rather than a normal human variation.

Through their bumbling and hypocrisy, Haggard, Foley and Craig have not only disgraced themselves, they have inflamed old stereotypes -- stereotypes that were being rapidly discarded as more and more gay people came out and shared the realities of their respectable, everyday lives with families and friends.

Now it may be that much more difficult for these same gay citizens to have an informed, rational dialogue with their fellow Americans about legitimate political and legal issues. Even if many Americans have shed old ideas and become more comfortable with homosexuality, will the media give equal time to sober debates about equal marriage rights, hate crimes legislation and job discrimination? Unlikely.

The more they're told about boys, bathrooms and prostitutes, the less Americans will learn about the real lives of their gay neighbors and co-workers. That might be a windfall for anti-gay activists and wedge-issue politicians. But it's a civic and moral disaster for the rest of us.

Steve Sanders is a Chicago attorney. E-mail: steve47408@yahoo.com.