WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH finished his GOP acceptance speech, with its stirring proclamation, "I believe in tolerance," the first song to play was a Latin tune recently popularized by Ricky Martin. It was the perfect ending to the closet convention.
Bush never spelled out who should be tolerated or what form that tolerance should take. It wasn't a line meant for women or racial minorities, since Bush's party had already openly embraced them and it would be odd for a modern politician to say he "tolerates" women and racial minorities. That leaves gays to be tolerated. Gay Republicans welcomed yet another in a parade of subtle signs that their party wants them. Others were free to interpret it differently.
"I believe in tolerance" is a long rhetorical distance from Pat Buchanan's declaration of a "culture war" at the same convention just eight years ago. But there is something peculiar and halting about this new brand of GOP tolerance. It asks gays to come inside - but to sit still once there.
Tolerance doesn't hate gays. In fact, it loves them - in the closet. Despite all the hoo-ha from skeptical gay organizations and activists, that is progress.
Under Bush's tolerance, gays will not likely be arrested in their homes because the anti-gay Texas sodomy law he supports is only a "symbolic gesture," he says. The new tolerance preserves symbols of disapproval but is embarrassed to act on them.
So gays can serve in the military as long as they keep quiet. Bush and Cheney Don't Ask as long as you Don't Tell. That's the bargain the military struck with gays under President Clinton. It has written the closet into American law. And after a fashion it suits the new Republicans just fine.
The closet, often defended as a situs of "privacy," is prized real estate for both moderate homophobes and ashamed gays. It is a space in which the former may declare he's tolerant and the latter may pretend he isn't despised.
The closet is detested by true-believing gay-haters who would prefer to pursue and punish the homosexuals they find there. The military's anti-gay witchhunts are a model for this. So are strictly-enforced sodomy laws. Bush is not a true-believing gay-hater.
So Republican Jim Kolbe, the most respected and respectable openly gay member of Congress, was allowed to speak to the delegates. It was better than eight years ago, when no openly gay person spoke to the convention. It better than four years ago, when a gay person whose homosexuality was known to his friends but not to delegates, spoke.
Kolbe's speech was purchased at the price that he could not acknowledge his homosexuality, or talk about gay issues, or even use the word "gay," from the lectern. Tolerance could let an openly gay man speak under the illusion that he isn't gay. He could be out and in the closet at the same time.
So Mary Cheney, the openly gay daughter of the party's vice presidential nominee, was allowed to sit with her parents and watch the convention festivities. Gay activists, in an understandable but somehow pathetic yearning for affirmation, scoured seating charts to determine whether Mary's partner had been allowed to sit near her. She wasn't there. That would have put Mary on a par with her sister, whose heterosexuality was shamelessly paraded before TV cameras in the form of her two children. Tolerance isn't ready for equality.
Lynne Cheney, Mary's mother, announced how proud she was of her "hard-working" and "decent" daughter. But then she denied her daughter had ever publicly acknowledged her homosexuality, an assertion so contrary to the public record it had the ring of pathological self-delusion. Tolerance prefers not to acknowledge publicly what everyone knows. If it can't have the reality of the closet it will have the form.
Here's how one tolerant observer described the new ethos in a message posted to a Website: "Most of us don't care what they [gays] do in the PRIVACY of their own homes. We do care when they get in our faces about it and [we] wish they would shut the hell up and mind their own business!!!"
Here is the same idea stated more delicately: Gays should have "no standing in law." That assertion, from the Republican platform, states the doctrine perfectly. It's not really that gays should be persecuted; it's that they shouldn't be recognized at all.
The Republican Party, the organizational embodiment of conservatism in this country, has learned a valuable lesson from its two consecutive defeats in presidential elections. Homosexuals are among us and they will not be eliminated by any means acceptable to the American people. The question now is, what is to be done with them?
One option is to pursue a religious crusade against gays, arresting them in their homes, investigating them, praying for their souls when they speak, and calling them "errant," as Jerry Falwell put it. Another option is to welcome gays into the institutions of American life, like the military and marriage, connecting gays with mainstream values. Bush hinted at the latter option when he said that his "tolerance" came from, not despite, his religious faith.
For now the party has decided to rest on an unstable middle ground. Like the closet itself, it's better than some conceivable alternatives, and it's an undeniable improvement over where we were, but it's not a stopping place.