IGF CultureWatch

Two weeks ago, news emerged that the co-founder of the website Manhunt.net had contributed $2,300 to the presidential campaign of John McCain. Uproar ensued.

Haven't heard of Manhunt?

Unless you're a gay man, that's to be expected. It's one of the most popular gay websites in the world, with 1 million registered members in the U.S. alone and 400,000 unique visitors a month. As its name implies, it's a site where many gay men go to find casual sexual encounters. Manhunt and sites like it have revolutionized one formative aspect of gay culture, taking what was once a public activity to the privacy of one's home.

Except that the Internet, as Jonathan Crutchley recently discovered, isn't really private. A successful real estate developer, he founded Manhunt with his life partner, Larry Basile, in 2001. He ran into trouble when Out, a gay magazine, published an article about the website in its current issue. The article, in passing, referred to Crutchley - who until last week was chairman of the board at Manhunt - as a "liberal Republican." That tidbit apparently shocked gay blogger Andy Towle, who within seconds found Crutchley's donation to McCain on a contributor database and posted the news on his website.

The shaming and condemnation of Crutchley was swift and unforgiving.

"Let's show MANHUNT what we in the gay community think of members of our community who support politicians who vote against the interests of the community," an anonymous commenter wrote. "Delete your MANHUNT profile!" Michelangelo Signorile, a gay liberal radio host, labeled Crutchley "asinine" simply for supporting McCain.

Rarely do you come across a political candidate who shares each and every one of your political views, and Crutchley's support for McCain was hardly different from that of any other donor who doesn't make the perfect the enemy of the good. "I believe McCain will be a better commander in chief than Obama, who also opposes gay marriage," Crutchley wrote on a website that covers the online personal ad industry. "If we have an experienced, seasoned person defending the country in this dangerous age, we will be able to argue about the gay agenda later."

That explanation might not please every gay activist, but it is a feeling shared by many gay people. According to exit polls, about 25% of gays voted for George W. Bush in the last two presidential elections (the actual number is likely higher, seeing that many gays do not identify themselves as such to pollsters).

The fact that Crutchley is a Republican ought not to come as much of a surprise then, especially considering that he's a self-made millionaire. And he's hardly a radical right-winger either. "I'm a Massachusetts Republican," he wrote, "which is about the same as being an Alabama Democrat."

But such nuance is apparently irrelevant to those who equate homosexuality with political liberalism. Manhunt hasn't revealed how many people canceled their profiles. However, just how poisonous Crutchley's politics can be in a gay milieu can be deduced from the speed with which he stepped down from his position as chairman - at "the request of the board," according to Basile. (Crutchley maintains his co-ownership of the site, meaning that subscribers will continue to put money into the pocket of an "evil" Republican in order to fulfill their sexual desires.)

In an open letter that's been all over the blogosphere, Basile reassured users of the website that his partner's political beliefs were his own. "It is too bad for the website if we lose customers, but PLEASE never refer to me as a Republican. I consider it an offense," he wrote.

Basile, who proudly pointed to his donation to the Barack Obama campaign in his letter, also claimed to the Boston Herald that the McCain campaign returned Crutchley's donation and that Crutchley, realizing the error of his ways, now supports Obama. There has been no independent verification of these claims, as neither the McCain campaign nor Crutchley have spoken to the media about the contretemps. If the intent was to silence a conservative gay voice, it appears to have succeeded.

The hue and cry over Crutchley's politics is all too familiar. Why can't gay activists countenance the idea of a "Massachusetts Republican"? Liberal intolerance. In the minds of too many on the left, gay people (like women and ethnic minorities) have to be liberal and support Democratic candidates. To do otherwise - that is, to have opinions on issues (even issues utterly unrelated to gay rights) that don't follow the left-wing line - is to be a traitor to the gay "community."

For too long, many gay-rights activists have acted as if throwing temper tantrums will magically bring about their political agenda. But labeling everyone with whom they don't agree a "bigot" does not help the worthy cause of gay equality.

The truth of the matter is that civil rights for gays can't come about without the help of Republicans. And this means that gay people - and straight supporters of gay equality - need to stand with, not silence, people like Crutchley who are working to change the GOP from within.

Gays need only look to California, where a state Supreme Court loaded with Republican appointees legalized gay marriage and the Republican governor is one of the most powerful pro-gay publicly elected officials in the country, to understand the importance of making gay rights a bipartisan cause.

Gayness is a sexual orientation, not a political one. Aside from their sexuality, gay people are no different from heterosexuals. There are gay people of all races, income levels, occupations, body types and, yes, political beliefs. Gay liberals are always crowing about the importance of "diversity" and lauding its importance on matters of race and gender. Too bad diversity doesn't count when it comes to politics.

In 1968, his second campaign for the White House, Richard Nixon rode into office on what later became known as the "Southern Strategy." While running as a moderate in most states, Nixon used code words like "states' rights" and "busing" to appeal to the racist tendencies of southern whites. This was the nail in the coffin of black support for the GOP, which, since the days of Abraham Lincoln, had traditionally been the party of civil rights. Two years ago, former Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman officially apologized for his party's attempt to "benefit politically from racial polarization."

How ironic that Barack Obama - the first, serious black presidential candidate in the history of the United States - would resurrect one of the most disreputable features of the Republican Party's campaign playbook.

Obama is the candidate of the same liberal elites who supported Howard Dean, ecstatic about the opportunity to challenge the old guard represented by Hillary Clinton. He's promising to end the cynicism embodied by Clinton, the sort that "triangulates," as he put it in a thinly veiled attack several weeks ago. He is also hungry, however, for black southern voters, many of whom are social conservatives on the subjects of homosexuality and the separation of church and state. So Obama decided to sign Donnie McClurkin, a Grammy-winning, African-American, "ex-gay" singer, onto his campaign as part of a gospel tour of the important primary state of South Carolina.

McClurkin denies being homophobic (explaining away his views with the usual "Christian" apologetics, loving the sinner but hating the sin), yet his message about gay people is egregious. He states that he was drawn into homosexuality by the rape and abuse he suffered as a child. Homosexuality, he says, is an affliction that its victims can overcome.

This sort of bigotry would be bad enough coming from a Pat Robertson or a Lou Sheldon - men far removed from the "gay lifestyle" - but it is especially harmful when spoken by someone who identifies as "ex-gay." Such individuals can at least claim to have a personal experience, and sympathy toward, homosexuality and their "past" thus gives them bogus credibility.

Would any major presidential candidate associate with a black pastor who spoke of Jews or black people in the denigrating way that McClurkin talks about gays? It's inconceivable. But gays are the one minority group that it's still acceptable to ridicule, and Obama - despite his preachy talk of "hope" - is perpetuating this phenomenon. The Obama campaign's continued advertising of its endorsement by McClurkin once again signifies that the Democrats are perfectly willing to use homophobia for their electoral advantage.

The Clintons perfected the art of speaking out of both sides of their mouths on gay rights - passing the Defense of Marriage Act along with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," all the while scooping up massive amounts of campaign contributions from gay bigwigs - and it appears that Obama is learning from his party's most skilled set of campaigners. So much for his recent promise to part ways with the cynics who "tout their experience working the system in Washington." Obama's starting to "work the system" just fine himself.

Atlantic Monthly blogger and Obama fan Andrew Sullivan has suggested that the benighted one should fire the staffer who invited McClurkin onto the campaign. This is wise counsel, but how can Obama fire the person who welcomed McClurkin onto the "gospel tour" while keeping McClurkin onboard? In a presidential campaign, the buck stops with the candidate and unless Obama is willing to dump McClurkin he cannot, in good faith, dump some hapless staffer.

Singling out a class of Americans as a basis for that fear - as Nixon did 1968 - is reprehensible and destroyed Bush's pledge to be a "uniter, not a divider." For many years, the Human Rights Campaign and the Democratic presidential candidates have promised to offer us something different.

But the events of the past week have shown that even the most platitudinous of liberals is not immune from utilizing the cynical election tactics concocted by the right.

Of all the absurd claims expressed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his recent address at Columbia University, his assertion that homosexuality does not exist in his country is the most ridiculous.

Ahmadinejad's florid statements regarding Jews ("We are friends with the Jewish people"), prevarications about Holocaust denial ("There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective"), and hedging about Iranian nuclear ambitions ("they are completely peaceful") paled in comparison to inflammatory statements he has made on those subjects in the past and were clearly tempered for his live American audience.

Even on the status of women, Ahmadinejad skirted critical questions, instead effusing, "Women are the best creatures created by God." But when asked about Iran's oppression of homosexuals, Ahmadinejad was uncompromising and unapologetic: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country ... We do not have this phenomenon. I do not know who's told you that we have it."

By this far-reaching statement, Ahmadinejad probably did not mean that out-and-proud gays of the Liberace variety ("like in your country") do not traipse through gay ghettos in Tehran, that Iran's homosexuals are more subdued and "butch" than America's; rather, it is reasonable to deduce that he meant homosexuality itself does not exist.

This notion is preposterous, particularly so to the Columbia faculty and students that rightly laughed at Ahmadinejad. Homosexuality is a natural feature of the human condition; it has existed since nearly the beginning of recorded history, spanning cultures all around the world. While homosexuals in Western democracies (where they largely don't have to fear for their lives) may identify themselves differently than they do in a place like Iran (where the state executes them), the notion that people attracted exclusively to people of the same sex don't exist in Iran-or any country, for that matter-is empirically false.

Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man-ensconced at Columbia University, no less-who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist."

The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

Desiring Arabs posits that the West views the Middle East as backwards, politically, culturally, and--ultimately Massad's field of interest--sexually; in this sense, his book fits comfortably in the postcolonial intellectual movement of which Said was the intellectual father. "For the Gay International, transforming sexual practices into identities through the universalizing of gayness and gaining 'rights' for those who identify (or more precisely, are identified by the Gay International) with it becomes the mark of an ascending civilization, just as repressing those rights and restricting the circulation of gayness is a mark of backwardness and barbarism," he writes.

From the start, Massad rejects the contemporary liberal view of homosexuality as an identity, seeing only "sexual practices." What's worse, he says, is that the attempt to "universalize" this supposedly provincial Western homosexual identity onto Arabs is used as a tool to distinguish between the "civilized" West and the "barbaric" Middle East.

Massad's thesis rests largely on Queer Theory, a voguish academic theory from the 1990s that stipulates that homosexuality is merely a "social construction" and not an inherent state of being. Massad writes that, "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating (emphasis mine)." Thus, not only are gay rights activists unleashing "epistemic...violence" on Arabs and Muslims who have same-sex relations by claiming them to be homosexual, they are responsible for the "political violence" of the regimes that oppress them.

As one illustration of his thesis, Massad chooses the "Queen Boat" incident of May 11, 2001, when a horde of truncheon-wielding Egyptian police officers boarded a Nile River cruise known as the Queen Boat, a floating disco for gay men. Fifty-two men were arrested, and many of them were tortured and sexually humiliated in prison. In a sensational, months-long ordeal, they were paraded in public, and images of them shielding their faces were blared on state television and printed in government newspapers. Most of the men were eventually acquitted, but 23 received convictions for either the "habitual debauchery," "contempt for religion" or both.

State repression against gay people happens on a frequent basis across the Middle East. Massad, however, who claims to be a supporter of sexual freedom per se, is oddly impassive when confronted with the vast catalogue of anti-gay state violence in the Muslim world. Massad, unlike Ahmadinejad, does acknowledge that "gay-identified" people exist in the Middle East, but he views them with derision. Take, for instance, his description of the Queen Boat victims as "westernized, Egyptian, gay-identified men" who consort with European and American tourists.

A simple "gay" would have sufficed. He smears efforts to free the men by writing of the "openly gay and anti-Palestinian Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank" and the "anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian [Congressman] Tom Lantos" who circulated a petition amongst their colleagues to cut off U.S. funding to Egypt unless the men were released. He then goes onto belittle not just gay activists (one of whom, a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society, referred to the Queen Boat affair as "our own Stonewall," in reference to the 1969 Stonewall riot when a group of patrons at a New York City gay bar resisted arrest, a moment credited with sparking the American gay rights movement) but the persecuted men themselves.

The Queen Boat cannot be Stonewall, Massad insists, because the "drag Queens at the Stonewall bar" embraced their homosexual identity, whereas the Egyptian men "not only" did "not seek publicity for their alleged homosexuality, they resisted the very publicity of the events by the media by covering their faces in order to hide from the cameras and from hysterical public scrutiny." Massad does not pause to consider that perhaps the reason why these men covered their faces was because of the brutal consequences they would endure if their identities became public, repercussions far worse than anything the rioters at Stonewall experienced. "These are hardly manifestations of gay pride or gay liberation," Massad sneers.

Massad claims that those Arabs who do accept a Western-style homosexual identity "remain a miniscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as 'gay' nor express a need for gay politics." He makes this sweeping assertion-upon which his entire, 418-page book is predicated-without any statistical evidence. Furthermore, he does not consider that the reason why Arab homosexuals may not "express a need for gay politics" might be because they would be killed if they did.

It becomes clear why Massad views gay-identifying Arab men with such scorn. In his mind, they have become willing victims of colonization. That's why Massad tacitly supports Middle Eastern governments' crackdown on organized gay political activity: He sees this repression as a legitimate expression of anti-colonialism. "It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek."

Thus, Arab gays (or, to use Massad's terminology, "so-called 'gays' ") should not identify as such, because to do so is accepting Western cultural hegemony. Massad even throws in a swipe at the "U.S.-based anti-Arab British Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya," a strong supporter of the Iraq war, for his alleged attempt to include protections in the new Iraqi constitution for homosexuals. How dare these men fight for their dignity as homosexuals!

It is true that the current understanding of "gay identity" is a relatively new concept, formed by Western thinkers over the past century years. This does not mean, however, as Massad contends, that a gay identity is inherently Western. The increasing acceptance of homosexuality as an acceptable way of life is a fruit of Western liberalism, but so is equality for women. Just because these notions originated in the West does not also mean that gays around the world do not also yearn for them or deserve them. But that is the logic of Joseph Massad.

Five years ago, a few months after Massad's article exposing the "Gay International" appeared, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece for The New Republic about the condition of Palestinian gay men living illegally in Israel. Halevi interviewed young men (who, Massad should note, all identified as homosexual) who had formed an unlikely subculture on the streets of Tel Aviv, fleeing their own families out of fear for how they'd be treated if they came out of the closet. Some had been the victims of torture by Palestinian Authority officials. One 21-year-old man given the pseudonym "Tayseer" was implicated in a sex sting devised by Palestinian police. Halevi reported:

Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn't know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback. Tayseer fled Gaza to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see. ("You slap one part of your body, and then you have to slap another," he recounts.) During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Through the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for being a homosexual.

We in the West may scoff at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's views on homosexuality in Iran, but while we laugh, a Columbia University professor-currently up for tenure-carries forth an insidious attempt to convince the world that men like Tayseer are somehow figments of the Western world's imagination. And who are we to complain about the murders of people who "do not exist"?

In 1972, the Democratic Party made a fateful decision from which it has never recovered: it nominated George McGovern for president. The gay rights movement is on track to emulate this disastrous choice.

Later this month, Congress is expected to vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would make it illegal to fire someone based upon his or her sexual orientation, as it is currently legal to do in 31 states. ENDA has existed in some form or another for more than 30 years, but only now does it have the votes to pass Congress.

The bill's chief sponsor is Rep. Barney Frank, the greatest champion of gay rights in Washington (full disclosure: I was an intern in Frank's district office in high school, many moons ago). Frank, oddly enough, is now being assailed by a coalition of nearly 300 gay rights organizations across the country calling itself "United ENDA," whose supporters have called him names like "sell out" and "traitor" because he opposes adding a provision protecting gender identity to the bill.

Frank does not disagree with the notion of protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination; he just realizes that a bill with such language has no chance of passing. For more than a decade, he has tirelessly worked to build a coalition of liberal and conservative Democrats along with moderate Republicans to support his version of ENDA. But this is not good enough for the all-or-nothing McGovern wing of the gay rights establishment.

Many of these activists would do well to brush up on the history of the 1972 Democratic presidential primary. For liberals, it felt redeeming to nominate an ideologically pure leftist like McGovern, whose mantra in the '72 campaign was "Come Home, America." But America overwhelmingly rejected this message and re-elected Richard Nixon in a landslide, giving him the second largest popular vote margin of victory in the history of the United States (McGovern won a single state, Massachusetts, losing his own, South Dakota).

It's not that the Democrats had a dearth of eligible candidates at the time.

There was Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a champion of organized labor and a hawk on defense in the mold of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Or Hubert Humphrey, vice president under Lyndon Johnson, the party¹s nominee in 1968 and a hero of the civil rights movement. Either of those men could have presented a formidable challenge to Nixon.

Those who supported McGovern, like those who support inclusion of the transgender provision, were no doubt motivated by their desire to have clean consciences; McGovern believed in everything they did. But how clean could their consciences have been for enabling the re-election of Nixon, and how clean will the consciences of Barney Frank's critics be if their insistence on the transgender provision leads to ENDA's failure? People's jobs are at stake here, not just the lofty abstractions of "solidarity" and "justice" about which the anti-ENDA forces so melodramatically whine.

The objective position of Frank's critics is that gay people should continue to be fired just because a miniscule minority (transgender people) is not included in this bill.

Those comprising United ENDA characterize the people who oppose a transgender-inclusive bill as "selfish." But who's really being selfish? The pragmatists like Frank who want to pass a good bill rather than fail with a perfect one, or the noisy activists claiming that all our rights be put on hold until they get their way? One expects this sort of political naïveté from grassroots activists and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. What's appalling is that ostensibly wiser heads at organizations such as Lambda Legal, National Stonewall Democrats and even the Human Rights Campaign (which has withheld support, but does not openly oppose the current version of ENDA) are acting so irresponsibly.

Let us all praise the faux-heroics of the gay rights movement¹s McGovernites; fawning recognition, after all, is what they seek. Don't get me wrong: These folks are perfectly entitled to go down in a blaze of glory, ideologically pure on the road to abject political failure. But they should not expect to drag the majority of gay people down with them.

According to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "we don't have homosexuals like in your country … In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you we have it." This has become the most infamous portion of his infamous speech at Columbia University last Monday.

A cynical explanation of Ahmadinejad's statement that Iran does not have gays "like" those in the United States is that Iran's friends of Dorothy don't wear Diesel jeans, listen to Christina Aguilera or drink Cosmopolitans. But I doubt that's what the Iranian president meant.

Rather, he claims that homosexuality itself does not exist in Iran, and, presumably, the rest of the Muslim world. This is obviously preposterous (homosexuality is a part of human nature and has existed in most, if not all, cultures throughout history) but the purported absence of Iranian homosexuals is certainly not for Ahmadinejad's lack of trying. His regime has presided over the widespread arrest, torture and murder of homosexuals; according to Iranian human rights groups, the Iranian government has murdered as many as 4,000 gays since the Islamic Revolution came to power in 1979.

The Columbia student body applauded Ahmadinejad throughout his rant, a display that should go down as one of the most shameful moments in the annals of American academia. To their credit, however, the audience laughed in Ahmadinejad's face when he uttered his assertion about gays. But Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad (who kills gays) and its near four-decades-long banning of the military (which merely prohibits them from serving openly) is no laughing matter.

In 1969, Columbia University expelled the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program from its campus in response to the demands of a faculty and student body radicalized by the Vietnam War. Today, the University maintains its opposition ROTC (as well as the Judge Advocate General Corps at its law school) based on the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which prevents openly gay people from serving in the armed services. Columbia and other elite schools claim that allowing the military to recruit on campus would violate their non-discrimination policies.

While it is difficult to persuade supporters of this policy on patriotic grounds (for instance, that having a strong military is more important than sending a feel-good, yet ultimately futile, message about homophobia), the most effective argument in favor of bringing the military back to campus is that banning it actually hinders the cause of ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

The policy can only be changed by Congress (it was an act of Congress in the first place) and Congress will only change the policy once the military supports its repeal. The easiest way to change the attitude of the military is to staff its ranks with fair-minded people the likes of which are more likely to be found at a place like Columbia than amongst the rural Southerners who overwhelm the military ranks. As I wrote in these pages two years ago, "The military brass itself is far more likely to empathize with someone who once wore a uniform and risked their life than they are to heed the hectoring of a liberal faculty member."

The least that can be said in Columbia's defense is that its opposition to ROTC and JAG is a good-faith effort to oppose homophobic policies. If that's the case, then how can those supporting the school's position on ROTC and JAG possibly justify President Lee Bollinger's invitation to Iranian President Ahmadinejad?

The Iranian regime's crimes against homosexuals are long and documented. Homosexuality is punishable by death, though some Iranian gays have escaped with mere lashes.

How dare this vicious thug come to our country and deny the existence of the thousands of gay people his regime has murdered. And how dare the students in the audience, who - had this been 1939 and it were Adolf Hitler speaking (as the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Dean John Coatsworth says he would have liked), would have fecklessly applauded the Fuhrer - cheered and clapped for this murderer.

If gay people are not angry at the spectacle that transpired on Morningside Heights last week, then they are not paying attention. It is disingenuous for Columbia to claim that it bans the military from campus in deference to the aggrieved dignity of gay people while simultaneously inviting a murderer of homosexuals. This is the farce that Columbia University has now become: a place where those wanting to serve their country are shunned while a man who murders gays is welcomed and applauded.

"I can't date someone with a different belief system" is what he told me. I expected this answer from the guy I had been casually seeing. From early on, I suspected that our differing political bents - his liberal, mine more conservative - would ultimately cause a split. Once, we had a heated argument when I said offhandedly that people who could not afford to care for children should not have them (not a policy prescription, just a profession of personal ethics). After that, I tried to avoid political discussions altogether. So his answer did not come as much of a surprise when, a few weeks after we broke up, I asked him for his reasons. His beliefs euphemism didn't render the blow any softer: We're both Jewish.

So much for dating a proud, progressive, and ostensibly tolerant liberal. But with him, as with other liberals I know, tolerance does not always extend to appreciating someone else's differing political views. Now living in Cambridge and having grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to school at Yale, I've been surrounded by liberals for nearly all of my life. Most would be astonished to hear that they're the most intolerant people I've ever met. After all, I, the supposedly closed-minded conservative, never considered this guy's liberal politics anathema to the point of wanting to call off our relationship. A Mary Matalin-James Carville pairing (she the Republican adviser to Dick Cheney, he the Democratic strategist who helped Bill Clinton get elected) ours would not be.

As a gay recovering leftist - to my eternal shame, I canvassed for Ralph Nader in high school - I have grown accustomed to having difficulties in the dating world. At Yale, most people knew me as "the gay conservative" for a column I wrote in the school paper, and my notoriety - not the source of sexy fascination that I might have hoped it to be - certainly did not help my dating prospects. My reputation preceded me. Once, at a party, a gay freshman who had only been on campus for a few days was introduced to me and said, "Oh, you're that [expletive] conservative." On Facebook.com - where people of my generation self-importantly advertise themselves to the world - I selected "Libertarian" to describe my "political views." I hate using labels and am hardly a doctrinaire free-marketeer, but I generally believe that government makes a mess of things and that society is better off when the state only does what's absolutely necessary.

Most gay people are liberal, and this is somewhat understandable; the left has embraced gay rights as a part of its political agenda, whereas the right, with some important exceptions, has not. But for many gays, liberalism is just as much a visceral, reactionary tendency as it is a positive affirmation of political belief. Many gays I know - especially those from red states - blame conservatism writ large as the villain that repressed them for so many years. Thus, their homosexuality dictates their political views on everything. For these gays, it is just as much a part of the "coming out" process to be a loud liberal as a proud homosexual.

But there's nothing about my homosexuality that dictates a belief about raising the minimum wage, withdrawing immediately from Iraq, and backing teachers' unions: all liberal causes that I strongly oppose. Yet there's a common, unattractive feature that many conservative gay men share: a serious chip on their shoulder. Being part of a community that is so intolerant of their views, gay conservatives can be embittered, patronizing, and castigatory of their gay brothers. It's not a particularly attractive attitude. Perhaps it's for this reason that I have not started cruising Log Cabin Republican meetings for dates.

Luckily, I am now dating someone who, though more liberal than I, appreciates my political independence. Let's just hope it lasts through this long campaign season.

When will the gay community's indulgence of Jim McGreevey end?

The disgraced former governor of New Jersey, in case anyone needs a reminder, was forced to announce his resignation in the summer of 2004 for, among other alleged offenses, putting his lover on the state payroll in a six-figure job for which he had few qualifications.

But that's not the story McGreevey would have you believe. Not if you listened to his resignation speech, read any of his interviews or his memoir, "The Confession," released to little acclaim last year. No, according to McGreevey, the reason he quit was because his "truth" is that he is "a gay American."

McGreevey, who readily admits that he is attention-starved and has been since he was a little boy, is now making headlines for his decision to become an Episcopalian priest. Bully for him.

There are millions of gay people in this country. Most of us are not as politically powerful and connected as Jim McGreevey once was. We work hard, pay our taxes, put up with discrimination, and, I'd like to think, if we ever get caught doing something wrong, do not rashly blame our fate on an inability to deal with sexual orientation. But Jim McGreevey was too much of a coward to admit that what he did was just plain wrong and that he was entirely to blame for his misfortune.

The world is unfair to gay people and the higher rates of suicide, depression and personally destructive behavior amongst gays, especially gay men, has a great deal to do with external homophobia. But let there be no mistake: McGreevey was forced to resign because he was a corrupt politician who shared more in common with the men in his administration now serving time in jail than he would care to believe.

Rather than own up to his abuse of office, McGreevey conflated his political corruption with his own struggles as a gay man. In so doing, he lent credence to the ignorant meme peddled by conservatives that gays are emotionally unstable and shifty people who cannot be trusted as individuals, never mind as public servants.

Conservatives once said gays should not be schoolteachers because they would molest students; they now say that soldiers should not be allowed to serve openly because they'll make sexual advances toward their fellow service members. McGreevey did the bigots' work for them by claiming it was his homosexuality that caused his resignation.

In his memoir, McGreevey says that even though it was wrong to carry on an affair with an employee, his lover Golan Cipel was more than qualified for the six-figure "consigliere" role that he played. In his desperate attempt to show that his sexual repression somehow caused his political corruption, McGreevey effortlessly unburdens himself of blame.

The logic of McGreevey's explanation dumps responsibility on the cruel, heterosexual world that repressed him, transformed him into a compulsive liar, fed his need for widespread public approval and - you guessed it - forced him to hire an unqualified foreign national with no FBI security clearance onto his personal staff and then sleep with him while his wife delivered their premature baby in an emergency C-section. Give me a break.

McGreevey's dissembling about "my truth" aids him in his mission to show that it was his homosexuality, or his psychologically diagnosed "severe adjustment disorder," that led him to behave inappropriately. Many straight politicians get in trouble for doing things similar to what McGreevey did, yet they do not make the absurd contention that their sexuality is an excuse for bad behavior. Never, in McGreevey's analysis, is anything plainly his fault and his fault alone.

Why can't McGreevey just recede into the past? As recent events indicate, McGreevey's desire for fame borders on the shameless. In addition to Oprah's couch, profiles in the Advocate and GQ and a highly publicized book tour, McGreevey auditioned for a role opposite Joan Rivers on a now-scuttled television show in which all three of the catty comedian's co-hosts would be gay men.

McGreevey's latest exploit is a desperate cry for attention, a shallow attempt to relive his 15 minutes of fame.

I think it's long past time we told him to just go away.

It is admirable that Gov. Spitzer has once again declared his support for gay marriage, stating in a legislative memo released last week that legalizing gay unions would "only strengthen New York's families."

He's right on the merits. But here's how much political capital Spitzer should spend fighting for same-sex marriage: Zero.

I say this not as a disinterested observer, but as a gay man who would like to get married someday.

The governor has plenty of other vital issues on his plate - from cleaning up Albany to reviving the upstate economy. And even if he didn't, going to the barricades for gay marriage will probably hurt, not help, gay couples in the long run.

Sometimes politics gets in the way of idealism. And no matter how just the cause, all the facts in this case are arrayed against those who claim that now is the right time to ram a gay-marriage bill through the state Legislature.

First, there is just no way a gay marriage bill would pass. Not only do a substantial number of Assembly Democrats oppose the idea, but a series of statewide polls have found that a majority of New Yorkers do as well, with opposition in some Assembly districts running as high as 90 percent. Opposition increases in the Republican-controlled state Senate, which has already made clear its intention to kill any such bill.

Contrary to gay activists' suggestions, bigotry isn't what motivates all gay marriage opponents. Many are simply decent people who are just a little uneasy about redefining a central social institution. I think they're wrong - but we cannot win the argument by strong-arming them.

Just look at what happened in Massachusetts. In 2004, full same-sex marriage rights became legal in the Commonwealth via judicial fiat. That resulted in a huge national backlash. In the ensuing three years, most states have passed constitutional amendments banning not only gay marriage but in some instances other legal arrangements protecting gay couples. In this sense, gays in these more conservative states are paying the price for the full marriage rights that gays in Massachusetts now enjoy.

If Spitzer and his allies in the Assembly push forward with a gay marriage bill, will New York see a campaign for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? Most gays might scoff at the notion of such an amendment ever passing in this supposedly liberal bastion - but with polls indicating that a majority of New Yorkers oppose gay marriage, why take the risk when the chances of winning are zip and the chances of losing, and losing hard, are better than negligible?

For now, Spitzer's time and energy would be far better spent fighting a battle that can be won: getting meaningful civil unions for New York's gay couples. This would extend all the same critical rights to gays without risking the potential damage of an overreaching marriage bill. Let us not allow the perfect union to be the enemy of a good match.

That the governor has been so consistent and outspoken in his support for gay marriage is no small thing. In so doing, he is starting to make it politically acceptable for mainstream Democrats with national political aspirations to voice their support for marriage equality.

He is ahead of his time. But that's exactly the point.

Last month, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force sent out a press release decrying the Supreme Court's decision in the consolidated cases of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzales v. Carhart. The Task Force said that the decision, which bans a particularly grisly form of terminating a fetus whose head is mostly outside the womb, was "draconian" and that the court had made itself the "tool of the anti-choice movement."

That was hardly the first time the Task Force had spoken out on issues at best tangential to the gay community. In addition to stating policy positions on abortion, the Task Force has decried the war in Iraq, supported racial preferences and opposed social security privatization and welfare reform.

In other words, it has again demonstrated that it is a garden-variety leftist organization masquerading as a gay civil rights group; it only represents the interests of gay people who also happen to be ideologically committed members of the furthest reaches of the political left.

I believe abortion should be, as President Clinton said, "safe, legal and rare." But just because one supports the right of women to have the control over their bodies that abortion laws seek to protect does not mean that gay people, ipso facto, believe that the gay rights movement - which has plenty of significant legal battles of its own to win - ought to take a position on abortion.

The strongest case that the Task Force has is that the legal reasoning used to erode abortion laws is the same as that used to harm gays; that is, a "strict constructionist" view of the Constitution that does not recognize any constitutional right to privacy.

In terms of choosing judges, this may be the rule in practice, but it is hardly a principle that opposition to abortion laws translates into opposition to gay rights; there are, after all, plenty of gays who oppose abortion. Moreover, there is a much stronger constitutional basis for the protection of the rights of consenting adults (in gay rights cases) than the right to take a potential life.

Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned state sodomy laws, rarely mentioned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and did so only in passing. In that case, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, found that "the Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual."

Abortion, reasonable people ought to be able to agree, raises more complicated questions regarding "intrusions" in the "personal and private" lives of individuals, namely, the potentiality of human life. It is for this reason that Kennedy himself, no slouch when it comes to the Constitution and hardly a right-wing reactionary, was able to write the majority opinions in both the pro-gay Lawrence and pro-life Gonzales v. Carhart cases without sounding intellectually inconsistent.

And as if it merited mentioning: abortion is biologically a heterosexual issue. Noting this fact does not make gays who oppose abortion selfish, it merely emphasizes further that abortion is, in its essence, something with which heterosexual women and their partners struggle. The only way in which abortion could ever be tied to gay political concerns is in the rare case when a surrogate or lesbian mother decides, for whatever reason, to abort the fetus that she agreed to carry prior to insemination.

But these instances are morally incomparable with the cases of most heterosexual women who choose to undergo abortions because of an unplanned pregnancy. As the gay columnist and law professor Dale Carpenter has written, "'Oops babies' are simply not a phenomenon common to gay life."

New pre-natal technology will pose interesting questions for gay activists who believe that abortion rights ought to be hewn to the fight for gay equality. For years, gay activists - backed by scientific discoveries - have claimed the existence of a gay gene. In the near future, if this gene is to be found and isolated, what will the Task Force say about those potential parents who wish to abort their gay gene-carrying fetus, just as a woman bearing a fetus with a cleft palate or Down's Syndrome is able to do?

Because of legal abortion, in the not-too-distant future, there may be a vast culling of potential gay lives simply because of the fact that those lives will be gay.

To win equality nationally, the gay rights movement will have to convince many people of the justness of its cause. A lot of those people are religious, live in the middle and southern parts of the United States and fervently oppose abortion. How does taking a position on the most divisive cultural issue of the past three decades advance the cause of gay rights?

Rep. Christopher Shays has an odd reason for supporting a proposal designed to eliminate employment discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

"I want a gentler world," the Connecticut Republican told The Associated Press in a recent interview about the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007. "I want a world where people are nicer to each other and more respectful. I want a more moral world and this legislation meets all those needs."

Shays is a co-sponsor of the bill, along with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio.

This was a curious statement, even for a moderate Republican like Shays. The essence of traditional conservatism, at least philosophically, acknowledges the world as it is, not the way supposedly starry-eyed liberals would like it to be.

Attempting to change people's deep-seated beliefs through the act of the legislative pen seems like something that Republicans make fun of Democrats for doing.

This is not to say that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is unworthy of bipartisan support. The bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation in the modern-day civil rights agenda. It would make it illegal for employers to determine hiring, firing, promotion or salary decisions on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Discriminating upon the basis of race, gender, national origin, age or disability has long been illegal, and if one accepts that homosexuality is as intrinsic a factor in someone's personhood as these other traits, and agrees that private employers ought not be allowed to discriminate based upon innate characteristics, then the bill should merit support.

Religious institutions and the military (which actively discriminates against open homosexuals already and is permitted to do so under the auspices of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy) would be exempt from the law.

It is currently legal to fire someone because of sexual orientation in 33 states, which the passage of a federal anti-discrimination bill like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would end.

This injustice of not being able to get a job or being fired simply for what one does in the bedroom, or because of one's gender identity, is as pressing for gay-rights advocates as the denial of marriage rights. Unfortunately, there is little credible statistical evidence of such discrimination, but gay-rights advocates are convinced the abundant anecdotal illustrations support their case for passage.

But at the end of the day, there is only so little that government action can do to make people "more moral," in spite of Shays' sanguine forecast. Understanding the confines of government power over the consciences of individuals is something that those on both the left and right would do well to appreciate. Anti-sodomy laws, overturned in 2003, did nothing to stop people from engaging in certain sex acts that some Americans view as immoral.

The prohibition of alcohol - which was mandated by constitutional fiat - did not stop people from drinking booze. Likewise, penalizing private employers for discriminating against homosexuals will not suddenly convert them into full-fledged supporters of gay equality.

There is an important distinction, however, between what people believe and how they act. Slavery was officially abolished in the United States in 1865, but any student of American history knows that active, government discrimination against blacks hardly ended with the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.

It was not until nearly 100 years later, with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that blacks-at least in law-were accorded full equality with other citizens. Prior to the passage of this bill, the federal government was repeatedly required, sometimes by physical might, to enforce equal treatment under the law.

It would be nice if we lived in a world where people did not discriminate against those of a different color, gender identity or sexual orientation. Perhaps if people just stopped and listened to the sternly worded resolutions that the United Nations issues every day, then maybe the genocide in Darfur would cease, Robert Mugabe would stop oppressing his starving people, and Muslim countries would mandate that women not be treated as property.

Would all this be so. But mere legislation won't make bigotry go away.