Whenever one of these morality scandals erupts - whether it involves homosexuality, adultery, or being on a list compiled by someone the media calls a "Madam" - it often involves a Republican. Critics love to charge Republicans with hypocrisy - preaching traditional family values to the rest of us by day while trolling bathrooms and pressing sweaty palms to computer keyboards by night.
Whatever explains these other public moral dramas, hypocrisy doesn't fully capture the GOP's plainly dysfunctional relationship to homosexuality. Yes, there are many prominent Republicans whose private actions are inconsistent with their traditional-values personas and thus are properly called hypocrites. Sen. Larry Craig is the latest of them. Jim West had an aggressively anti-gay record both as a Washington state legislator and as mayor of Spokane, yet cruised for gay sex and anonymously told an online acquaintance that he hated the "sex Nazis" who try to regulate people's private lives. There are many other examples.
But there are also many closeted gay Republicans not closely associated with the party's religious right for whom the hypocrisy charge is ill-fitting. Mark Foley, of last year's congressional page scandal, was not an anti-gay member of Congress. While he didn't support everything I wish he had, I'd take his record on gay issues over many Democrats'.
Most gay Republicans despise the party's anti-gay rhetoric and actions. They're Republicans because they're pro-life, support low taxes, want a strong national defense, or for any of a hundred other reasons. You could call it hypocrisy to be gay and work for a generally anti-gay political party, regardless of the gay person's own views or what she does within the party to oppose its anti-gay policy positions, but if so, this is surely a watered-down form of the vice.
What unites these scandals is not really hypocrisy. It's two other things. First, nearly all the gay Republicans working in Washington or elsewhere are to one degree or another closeted. Second, at a personal level, very few Republican officials around them care whether someone is gay.
From the top of the party hierarchy to the bottom, few Republicans personally and viscerally dislike gay people. President Bush has had friends he knew were gay. Vice President Cheney's daughter is gay. Even the most prominently and vigorously anti-gay Republican, Sen. Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, had a gay spokesperson whom he defended when his homosexuality became known.
The big, open secret in Republican politics is that everyone knows someone gay these days and very few people - excepting some committed anti-gay activists - really care. It's one of the things that drives religious conservatives crazy because it makes the party look like it's not really committed to traditional sexual morality.
So to keep religious conservatives happy the party has done two things. First, it has supported anti-gay public policies.
Second, to keep the talent it needs and simply to be as humane and decent as politically possible toward particular individuals, the party has come up with its own unwritten code: you can be gay and work here, we don't care, but don't talk about it openly and don't do anything to make it known publicly. It's the GOP's own internal version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
This is ideological schizophrenia: private acceptance welded to public rejection. It's a very brittle alloy.
For the closeted gay Republican, this alloy means a life of desperation and fear and loneliness, of expressing one's true feelings only in the anonymity of the Internet, of furtive bathroom encounters, of late nights darting in and out of dark bars, hoping not to be seen. It means life without a long-term partner, without real love.
Worst of all, it may mean a life of deceiving a spouse and children. Most of the men caught cruising in parks, bathrooms, and other public places are deeply closeted and often married. They don't see themselves as having many other options.
Nevertheless, it seems to work until the day you get caught tapping your toe next to an overzealous cop. Desperation sets in and you say things that bring everyone great joy at your expense, like, "I'm not gay, I just have a wide stance."
For the GOP, this alloy of public rejection and private acceptance means enduring more of these periodic public morality convulsions. How to end it? The private acceptance will continue and, I predict, become even more common as young conservatives comfortable around gay people take over. There will be no purging the party of gays. There is no practical way to purge them, and even if there were, most Republicans would be personally repulsed by the effort.
These closeted politicians, staffers, and party functionaries will periodically be found out and again will come the shock, the pledges to go into rehab, the investigations, the charges of hypocrisy, the schadenfreude from Democrats and libertines, and the sense of betrayal from the party's religious conservatives.
The only practical way out of this for the GOP is to come to the point where its homosexuals no longer feel the need to hide. And _that_ won't happen until the party's public philosophy is more closely aligned with its private one. That will be the day when the GOP greets its gay supporters the way Larry Craig, with unintended irony, greeted reporters at his news conference: "Thank you all very much for coming out today."