IGF CultureWatch

The recent scandal involving Rep. Mark Foley sending sexually explicit text messages to sixteen- and seventeen-year-old former congressional pages has resurrected the ugly stereotype of gays as pedophiles. I am no longer surprised when I hear this sort of garbage from the Family Research Council or Paul Cameron. But when the Wall Street Journal links the two by criticizing those "who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys," it makes me nervous-not to mention angry. (Congressional Democrats have been no better, playing the "child predator" card for all it's worth.)

First, a little bit of perspective on the scandal driving this. The young men whom Foley courted were sixteen and seventeen-not adults, but not children either. The age of consent in Washington, D.C. (and many other places) is sixteen. Issues of potential harassment aside, had Foley had sex with these young men in Washington, it would have been perfectly legal.

Yet as far as we know, he did not have sex with them: he e-mailed and text-messaged them. Foley may be a jerk, a hypocrite, a creep-even a harasser-but there's no evidence that he qualifies as a child molester.

Research shows that gay men are no more likely than straight men to molest children. Moreover, mental health professionals are virtually unanimous in recognizing that most males who molest boys are not "gay" by any reasonable definition of that term: they have no interest in other adult males and often have successful relationships with adult females. This fact should not be surprising, because a young boy is at least as different qua sexual object from an adult male as an adult female is. In other words, it's one thing to be attracted to adults of the same sex, it's quite another to be attracted to children of either sex. Lumping these categories together not along maligns innocent people; it distracts us from the real threats to children. (For a useful analysis of the research in this area, see this article by Mark Pietrzyk.)

But it gets worse. For the pedophilia myth is yet another case of right-wingers arguing from what is not true to what does not follow. Suppose, purely for the sake of argument, there were a higher incidence of child molestation among homosexual males than heterosexual males. Should gay men no longer be permitted to be teachers? Pediatricians? Day care providers?

Be careful how you answer. Because one thing the research does clearly show is that men are far more likely to be child molesters than women. So if you think gay men should be restricted from these positions under the hypothetical (and false) assumption that they are more likely to be child molesters than straight men, you should conclude-in the actual, non-hypothetical world-that straight men should be thus restricted, and that all such jobs should go to lesbians and straight females. We know for a fact that men pose a higher risk of child molestation and other crimes than women do.

Yet somehow, when it comes to straight men, we are able to distinguish between those behaving well and those behaving badly. This double standard was quite apparent as the Foley scandal broke. Around the same time, admitted heterosexual Charles Carl Roberts walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and fatally shot five female students. It turns out that Roberts told his wife that he had previously molested young girls. Yet no one took this story as tarnishing heterosexuality. No one concluded, "Aha! Can't trust straights." That would be a foolish inference.

Just as foolish as making inferences about all gays from the case of Mark Foley-who, it is worth repeating, did not even have sex with the pages (as far as we know), much less kill anyone.

The point is that some gays, just like some straights, behave badly. This is not news. Nor is it a reason to draw blanket inferences about gays.

Some years ago I was invited to Nevada to debate a Mormon minister on same-sex marriage. One of his central arguments-I am not making this up-was that we should not support same-sex marriage because research shows that gays are more likely to engage in domestic violence than straights. I had never heard of the studies he cited, so it was difficult to challenge him directly on his sources. Instead, I asked, "So, because some asshole beats his husband, I'm supposed to stop loving mine? And everyone else should stop supporting me in my loving, non-abusive relationship? Is that what you're arguing?"

He never had an answer to that.

In the early 1980s when the Centers for Disease Control created the term "Men who have sex with men" (MSM) to refer to an AIDS risk group, many of us criticized the term as a euphemism for gay men. Now, however, a new survey of "MSM" in New York City shows some important differences between gay men and non-"gay" MSM. That suggests that we were wrong to reject the term entirely, but that the CDC was also wrong to lump us all together.

Our objection to "MSM" had a good deal of merit. It seemed like a social conservative attempt to deny that men could actually be constitutionally oriented toward love and sex with other men, instead treating our orientation as just a succession of sexual acts.

Even more, it rejected our self-affirming label "gay." After all, one of the first steps of the ex-gay process is to persuade gay men to stop thinking of themselves as "gay" or "homosexual"--i.e., to reject the identity.

Whatever the CDC's reasoning, it is certainly true that during the Reagan administration, when social conservatives began to wield a great deal of influence, any attempt by the CDC to talk about "gay men" or "gay and bisexual men" would have met vigorous criticism and objection.

However, over the years, "MSM" came to have a sort of plausibility. There are large numbers of men who have and may well prefer sex with other men, but who use a variety of rationalizations to evade acknowledgment of their homosexuality or bisexuality, and the CDC's MSM designation did manage to include them without seeming threatening.

How many? A 2003 telephone survey of more than 4,000 men conducted by the New York City public health department just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that MSM who deny being gay are more numerous than self-acknowledged gay or bisexual men.

According to Reuters, fully 10 percent of the men in the survey who identified themselves as "straight" said in the past year they had sex with one or more men but no woman. And that figure is undoubted low since telephone surveys traditionally encounter the greatest degree of cover-up of homosexual activity.

Since only 9 percent of the men acknowledged being gay or bisexual (or "unsure"), that means that more straight men are engaging in gay sex than gay and bisexual men are, although further questioning determined that they have fewer partners than the gay/bi men.

They use a variety of rationalizations to deny being gay. They may think "gay" designates a specific set of social behaviors or "lifestyle"--regularly going to clubs, taking drugs, attending parties, obsessing with fashion, etc. That most gays do few or none of these things is irrelevant if the "straight" men have accepted that stereotype.

Or they may think "gay" designates men who act publicly in a feminine (or effeminate) manner--a stereotype left over from the 1950s and still common enough among some males at lower educational levels. They may feel that if they act in a traditionally masculine fashion, they are not "gay."

They may believe that "gay" men are the ones who take the receptive or "insertee" role in sexual behavior. If they prefer the inserter role, then they don't think of themselves as gay. That many openly gay men also prefer the inserter role, and many others switch roles easily--thus being alternately gay and not gay--may not make sense to them. This view seems to be particularly common in third world countries.

Then too, some men make a radical distinction between their sexual and emotional desires and deny being gay if, while enjoying sex with men, their only emotional relationships are with women. Maybe they never allow their succession of sexual contacts to develop an emotional connection. But it would also apply to the significant number of men whose self-image and self-esteem largely depends on being loved and needed by a women.

Not surprisingly given these rationalizations, the "straight" men who had gay sex were more likely to belong to a racial or ethnic minority, to be born in a foreign country, and to have a lower educational level. They were also less likely to have used a condom during their most recent sexual activity with a man. But if they think that by denying that they are gay or bisexual they are protected from AIDS, they are denying reality. And denying reality invariably has a cost.

The CDC may not be doing anyone, including itself, a favor by using a single term for gay men and for "straight" men who have sex with men. They are different populations with different attitudes and behaviors. So whatever the CDC wishes to call those "straight" men, maybe after more than two decades it is time for the CDC to start calling gay men by our own name.

There are many things one could say about the scandal involving disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida). It is foremost a tale of an individual's misuse of power and trust, a willingness to disregard the vulnerable position and psychology of eager-to-please youths.

It is a tale of self-abasement, a 50-something male trying desperately to sound cool and hip to the 16- and 17-year-olds he's attracted to. The puerile internet messages allegedly sent by Foley to the pages are painful to read. They make you cringe in embarrassment for the man.

It is a tale of a political party hoist on its own petard of anti-homosexual moralism and opportunism. However, celebration of this irony among gay-rights advocates is misplaced. In the short-term Republicans will lose a seat, Foley's own. But in Foley's Republican-leaning district the likely long-term effect is the loss of a pretty reliable pro-gay vote. Foley consistently scored well with gay political groups, almost certainly higher than his eventual (post-2008) Republican successor will. In a larger sense, revving up anti-gay sentiment, as the Foley scandal has done, is not likely to benefit Democrats, who are rightly seen as more favorable to gays.

It is a tale of closets, of Foley's and of many of the gay Republicans who work in Washington, and of the terrible costs that maintaining these closets can exact on everyone, straight and gay. This is not to say that Foley-who was really more openly closeted than closeted-was led to his behavior simply by his shame and fear. But Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) is right that the closet makes these episodes more likely.

It is a tale of what NGLTF's Matt Foreman called "blood libels" reaffirmed for those inclined to believe them-of gays as alcoholics, as damaged and twisted sexual abuse victims, and as child molesters themselves.

Any of those story lines could make a column, but I am interested here in something else. The Foley mess reaffirms some things we have long known about the nature and characteristics of anti-gay prejudice.

William Eskridge, a Yale law professor, has written that anti-gay prejudice has been marked historically by three characteristics. These are: (1) "hysterical demonization of gay people as dirty sexualized subhumans"; (2) "obsessional fears of gay people as conspiratorial and sexually predatory"; and (3) "narcissistic desires to reinforce stable heterosexual identity . . . by bashing gay people." The primary historical traits of homophobia are thus hysteria, obsession, and narcissism.

We can see the first of these characteristics, hysteria, in some of the reactions to the Foley scandal. "While pro-homosexual activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two," declared Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

There is no good evidence of a link between homosexual orientation and pedophilia. Professional anti-homosexuals, like Perkins, often cite junk science to support their hysterical views of dangerous and hypersexualized homosexuals.

Ken Lucas, a Democrat running for Congress from Kentucky, said that Republican leaders should have closely monitored Foley simply because he's gay. There was no more reason to watch over Foley because he's gay than there was to supervise the other 530 or so members of Congress because they're straight, but hysteria sees no inconsistency.

The second characteristic of anti-gay prejudice, obsession, has been on full display. Some Republicans in Congress and religious conservatives told reporters that they suspect a "gay subculture" has infiltrated the party. This "Velvet Mafia"-as some have called it-allegedly consists of a number of gay Republican congressional staffers and other personnel. A conservative website asserted that the gay conspiracy includes nine chiefs of staff, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications for prominent congressional Republicans.

The conspirators, the story went, included several gay Republican staff members who personally handled the Foley case. An especially irresponsible report by CBS News's Gloria Borger recounted how the scandal had "caused a firestorm among GOP conservatives." Without any rebuttal or fact-checking, Borger reported that conservatives "charge that a group of high-level gay Republican staffers were protecting a gay Republican congressman." There is no evidence for this charge, and some pretty good evidence against it, but anti-gay websites quickly praised Borger for breaking the "PC barrier."

This baseless fear of a gay mafia wielding enormous power undetected has a certain obsessional quality. It is deeply conspiratorial, fed by fantasies of gays as sexual predators.

Others-including Perkins, Newt Gingrich, Patrick Buchanan, and even the Wall Street Journal editorial page-suggested that Republican leaders were paralyzed from acting against Foley early on by fear of a pro-gay backlash. To believe this of GOP leaders-who have opposed every measure for gay equality-requires obsessional and conspiratorial delusion about the power and influence of the gay civil rights movement in America.

Finally, the Foley mess has demonstrated the third characteristic of anti-gay prejudice, narcissism. If the GOP loses one or both houses of Congress in November, one supposed lesson will be that the party was too lenient on homosexuals-turning off the party's base of religious conservatives. Some thus see the scandal as a chance to cleanse the GOP of the impurity of homosexuality, to reassert the party's stable, pro-family heterosexual identity.

Chances are that most Americans, including most Republicans, will reject the hysteria, obsession, and narcissism of anti-gay prejudice this mess has loosed upon us. Most GOP leaders have been careful to avoid drawing any of the "larger lessons" about gay people that professional anti-homosexuals would like us to learn.

The Foley scandal doesn't say anything very important about America's gays. But it says a lot about America's anti-gays.

It's October, and the leaves are turning Code Orange and Red. But just when we were expecting another conveniently timed terror alert, the Republicans have begun self-destructing. Suddenly there appears an increased likelihood that they will lose at least one house of Congress, if only due to their inept handling of a scandal and not because they are shredding the Constitution, recruiting enemies faster than our soldiers could ever kill them, and bankrupting America.

While it is a relief to see Republicans firing at each other for a change instead of at the rest of us, we cannot count on it to last. The fact that the ruling party's bumbling militarism, extra-legal methods, and imperial arrogance toward the rest of the world have advanced democracy neither at home nor abroad is insufficient to swing the election unless enough conservatives join liberals in this conclusion.

Into the breach steps multi-threat blogger, columnist, pundit and famous homosexual Andrew Sullivan, offering a conservative antidote to George W. Bush's toxic alchemy of politics and fundamentalism. Sullivan's new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, published this week, is a harsh assessment of the current Republican Party.

Describing the president's refusal to hear alternative viewpoints, inability to concede error, and virtual treason charges against his critics, Sullivan argues that the best way to understand Bush is in the light of his born-again conviction that he is on a mission from God.

When Bush described civil marriage as "a sacred institution," he was doing more than appealing to his evangelical base by attacking gays. He was seeking to usurp states' rights, violate the Establishment Clause, and erode the secular public square in which Americans negotiate their differences.

As Sullivan observes, fundamentalists are threatened not only by homosexuals but by the entire modern world: "If you take your beliefs from books written more than a thousand years ago, and if you believe in these texts literally, then the appearance of the modern world must truly terrify." This fear leads to a retreat into denial masked by certitude. Pope Benedict XVI, for example, insists that no one's conscience is authentic if it differs at all from his medievalist views. Sullivan compares this to the old Marxist line about "false consciousness."

Sullivan devastatingly dissects the theocons' recourse to "natural law," which comes from Aristotle by way of Aquinas and serves mainly to mask a religious purpose. For example, the view of sex held by natural lawyers like Robert P. George renders even most heterosexual sex "unnatural." Sullivan notes that one sign of sex having natural functions beyond reproduction is the existence of the clitoris, which is not essential for reproduction but is the main source of a woman's sexual pleasure. The trouble with the theocon idea of nature is that it is based not on empirical observation but on abstract notions of what things are "for."

One of the most chilling illustrations of Bush's fundamentalist politics, Sullivan writes, was his handling of the Terri Schiavo case. This president who resisted interrupting his vacation to deal with Hurricane Katrina flew back to Washington to sign a bill purporting to save a woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years.

Sullivan, inspired by Montaigne's amused sense of human fallibility, proposes a conservative politics of modesty and restraint based on individual citizens' freedom to pursue happiness rather than on a centralized imposition of virtue. He states, "The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn't know."

Sullivan's case for "the conservatism of doubt" is buttressed by a luminous discussion of British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott rested his philosophy on skepticism rather than dogma, stressed the contingency of human existence, and taught that the proper function of politics is not to press a particular result but to secure freedom.

The book's tone is not lecturing but conversational. Sullivan is most eloquent when he describes how Jesus talked in parables, offered more questions than answers, and commanded his disciples to love one another. Sullivan contrasts this with the religious right's shrill bossiness, mega-churches that resemble shopping malls, and obsessive slanders against gay people.

At a Cato Institute discussion of Sullivan's book on October 3, conservative columnist David Brooks argued that the GOP's excesses stem more from partisan tribalism than from fundamentalism. He has a point: those in power have been allowing partisan interests to trump their principles since the dawn of the republic. Reports on the Mark Foley scandal suggest that House Republican leaders were more concerned about the pots of money Foley raised for them than about his improper conduct. Furthermore, the use of evangelical rhetoric by prominent Republicans like Tom DeLay appears entirely cynical. But the fundamentalist political furor that Bush and his allies helped unleash is no less dangerous for the instigators' impure motives.

The theocons may not be able to revive the glories and certitudes of Christendom, but they can do a lot of damage to our country while they try. Sullivan counters them not with a program but with an alternative political philosophy. At a time of anti-immigrant fear-mongering, it is fitting that this privileged immigrant should call on his adopted country to heed the better angels of its nature and stand up to its religious bullies. As his admirable book shows, the best way to defend liberties under threat is to exercise them vigorously.