Republican Gomorrah Read online

Another semicloseted gay conservative, the professional Internet rumor-monger Matt Drudge (who once appeared unsolicited at David Brock’s doorstep with a bouquet of flowers), joined the cover-up of Foley’s crimes. Citing an unnamed source, Drudge reported that the young page exchanging lurid instant messages with Foley, Jordan Edmunds, had actually goaded him into typing revealing statements and had then distributed them to Democratic operatives as part of a prank. Edmunds’s lawyer dismissed Drudge’s uncorroborated, unsourced story as “a piece of fiction,” and soon enough, it disappeared from his website.

  On September 29, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi demanded on the House floor an investigation of Foley’s behavior. Republican Minority Leader John Boehner, who had known of Foley’s actions months before but appeared to do nothing, headed off Pelosi’s investigation by referring Foley’s case to the House Ethics Committee.

  That same day, Foley tendered his resignation. Claiming his sexually inappropriate behavior had been fueled by alcoholism, he shut himself away in a rehabilitation clinic. Through his lawyer, Foley disclosed that Father Mercieca had molested him when he had been a teenager, suggesting that the experience had conditioned him to act the same way with young, vulnerable boys. According to the Reverend Pamela Cooper White, an ordained pastor who has counseled victims of clergy abuse for over twenty years, many priests, like Mercieca, were sexually molested during their own childhoods. When they assume positions of power, White wrote, these priests often exhibit “poor impulse control; a sense of entitlement, or being above the law, or other narcissistic traits. . . .” The vicious cycle often continues through their victims, especially when they become powerful figures like Foley.

  Foley’s tragic confession failed to inspire sympathy among the Republicans who had previously protected him. His former leader in Congress, Tom DeLay, was also a child of abuse who fell into alcoholism and promiscuity during the first half of his adult life. But DeLay confessed his sins and bared his soul early in his career, earning the good graces of James Dobson and the Christian right. Foley’s confession, on the other hand, seemed more like a clumsy attempt at damage control than an earnest plea for Christian forgiveness. His behavior mirrored that of many priests accused of abuse. “Sometimes—as when threatened with suspension by their denomination—they admit that they are in need of treatment to ‘build up their fortitude against being seduced,’” White wrote. “What they generally fail to see is their own responsibility.”

  The political fallout from the Foley scandal shattered the Republicans’ already shaky chance of holding Congress in the 2006 midterms. By law, even though Foley had resigned, his name remained on the ballot in his home district, compelling the Republican slated as his successor, Joe Negron, to campaign under the slogan “Punch Foley for Joe,” a thinly disguised double entendre. But disgruntled voters, including many Republicans, instead elected Democrat Tim Mahoney, the first Democrat ever to represent the overwhelmingly Republican district since it was created in 1973.

  In the wake of the Foley scandal, Hastert, who had become a symbol of his party’s moral decay, ignored calls from voices of the conservative movement, from direct-mail dean Richard Viguerie to Michael Reagan, the son of Ronald Reagan, for his own resignation. Instead, he blamed his troubles on, “ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by [liberal billionaire philanthropist] George Soros.” The Democrats exploited the image of Hastert with devastating effect, rolling out an ad blitz connecting five Republican incumbents to Hastert’s cover-up of Foleygate. On election night, the GOP lost six Senate seats and thirty-one seats in the House. In a special election in March 2008, even the retiring Hastert’s seat, which he had held for decades, fell to a Democrat. The political tide had shifted, in no small part because of the Republicans’ Foley cover-up.

  The impact of the Foley scandal was especially damaging for the Christian right, which had depended on the congressional Republicans to pipeline a steady stream of anti-abortion and anti-gay bills to the President’s desk. Tony Perkins vented the movement’s rage in a tirade against gay Republicans. “Has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder,” Perkins fumed in a mass e-mail to his supporters. He continued: “Does the [Republican] party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?” A photo of a smiling Trandahl appeared beside Perkins’s angry missive.

  The Reverend Don Wildmon, the churlish founder of the American Family Association, a Christian-right group based in Tupelo, Mississippi, went a step further. In early October, a group of gay rights activists had compiled a list of gay Republicans working on Capitol Hill and distributed it to Wildmon and other Christian-right leaders. Now the old reverend was furious and wanted a purge of “the homosexual clique” that he accused of boring from within the Republican infrastructure. “They oughta fire every one of ’em,” Wildmon told me in his guttural Southern drawl. “I don’t care if they’re heterosexual or homosexual or whatever they are. If you’ve got that going on, that subverts the will of the people; that subverts the voters. That is subversive activity. There should be no organization among staffers in Washington of that nature, and if they find out that they’re there and they’re a member, they oughtta be dismissed el pronto.”

  Wildmon’s demand for a gay purge recalled the real one carried out during the 1950s at the behest of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Influenced by the wildly popular 1951 screed Washington Confidential, which reported that “at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll” were turning the nation’s capitol into “a garden of pansies,” McCarthy claimed the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had been infiltrated by a “hominterm” dead-set on undermining national security. His charges led to a massive inquisition of suspected homosexual bureaucrats, subjecting thousands to interrogations about their private lives. Many, if not most, were summarily fired. Some committed suicide after losing their livelihoods.

  Then, as now, the far right’s anti-gay crusade was orchestrated not only by bigots but also by self-loathing homosexuals. Chief among them was McCarthy’s grand inquisitor, the ruthless Roy Cohn. Cohn, a deeply closeted homosexual, continued to terrorize gays well after the liquor-sodden McCarthy drank himself to death. Cohn opposed New York City’s first gay rights law in the 1970s, declaring that homosexuals would threaten the safety of children if they were allowed to work as schoolteachers. Then, in the weeks leading up to his death from AIDS in 1986, Cohn, who falsely claimed he had liver cancer, launched another lobbying blitz against a New York City gay rights ordinance. This time, he justified his activism on the grounds that the proposed law “defended fags.”

  “Roy [Cohn] was not gay,” Republican operative Roger Stone remarked to legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin. “He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access.” Cohn became a mentor to Stone, teaching him the hardball tactics he used to help Ronald Reagan sabotage George H. W. Bush in the 1980 Republican primary. Cohn and Stone’s friendship extended beyond politics and into their mutual affinity for the sexual underworld. Stone resigned from Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign when tabloids connected him and his wife to an ad in a magazine called Local Swing Fever. “Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband, experienced swingers, seek similar couples or exceptional muscular . . . single men,” the ad stated. Stone, who freely admits he is a regular at Miami-area swinger clubs, boasted in 2007 of using his sex industry contacts to implicate then New York Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer to the FBI in patronizing a high-priced hooker. “I’m not guilty of hypocrisy,” Stone told Toobin. “I’m a libertarian and a libertine.”

  The Republican infrastructure is so honeycombed with closeted homosexuals that any attempt by homophobes such as Wildmon to ferret them out would be impossible. During my interview with the reverend, I rattled off
names of gay conservatives that I thought were well known and might be on the list he had been provided: Lee LaHaye, the chief operating officer for the far-right Concerned Women for America and son of Tim LaHaye, author of the anti-gay tract The Unhappy Gays; John Schlafly, son of conservative movement doyenne Phyllis Schalfly (who has called gays “vicious”) and director of the Illinois branch of his mother’s Eagle Forum; and Robert Traynham, at the time the gay, African American spokesman for the hysterically homophobic Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who had infamously compared homosexuality to “man-on-dog” sex.

  Wildmon interrupted me mid-sentence, and backpedaled on his earlier cry for a purge. “Well, if a senator’s got a homosexual member of his staff,” Wildmon said, “and if he’s doing his job and he’s working for the good of the senator, then I don’t have a problem with that.”

  In the end, Wildmon’s blustery threats did little more than put gay Republican staffers on notice. If they did not remain useful tools for the Christian right, he seemed to be saying, they would invite fire and brimstone from the movement. One gay Republican staffer told the New York Times that the right’s hysterical reaction to Foleygate had brought him nothing but “siege and suspicion.” While Wildmon and his fellow culture warriors lashed out at the lavender menace on Capitol Hill, they seemed blithely unaware of the extent to which their attacks contributed to an atmosphere that would further damage Republicans. Just as Foleygate seemed to wane, a new wave of right-wing sex scandals hit. Among those swept up in these scandals was one of the movement’s most stalwart allies, Idaho Senator Larry Craig.

  For years, the virulently right-wing Craig had batted away pointed rumors that he was gay and had sexual encounters with men in public bathroom stalls. In October 2006, gay rights activist Michael Rogers publicized interviews with four men who said they had had sex with Craig in the bathroom at Washington’s Union Station. Craig denied these rumors, as he had done in the past, but his behavior did not change. Like Foley, even as suspicion of Craig’s secret life mounted, the senator’s behavior grew ever bolder, as though he harbored some sort of political death wish.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE WIDE STANCE

  Larry Craig fostered an all-American reputation during his years at Midvale High, in rural Idaho, in the early 1960s, starring at center for the football team and helping the cash-strapped school band to find used uniforms so they could march in the Boise Christmas parade. A born leader, he went on to become student body president and president of its Delta Chi fraternity. But while he was leading Delta Chi, allegations about his homosexual tendencies first spread; one young pledge said Craig brought him into a room in the frat house and suggested they have sex. After graduation, Craig enlisted for a six-year tour in the Idaho National Guard but was honorably discharged in 1972 after six months, prompting rumors that homosexual indiscretions led to his dismissal. Craig insisted that foot problems were the reason for his discharge.

  Four years later, Craig won a seat in the state legislature, and then he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Once in Washington, a cosmopolitan city with a burgeoning gay subculture, Craig was exposed to temptations he hadn’t encountered in the rigid climate of his native Idaho. In 1982, a CBS News story alleging widespread sex between congressmen and male congressional pages put Craig’s political ascent into momentary peril. Craig was never implicated in the scandal, but when a reporter stopped by his office to ask his opinion on it, Craig felt compelled to deny his involvement, an unusual adamancy that left suspicion. The following year, Craig married Suzanne Scott, a divorcée with three children from her previous marriage. But still the rumors wouldn’t go away. In 1990, when Craig declared his candidacy for the Senate, his opponent openly referred to Craig as gay. When a reporter asked him whether he was homosexual, Craig snapped, “Just ask my wife.”

  Despite the continuing allegations, Craig was elected to the Senate. There, he remained a reliable “yea” vote on any piece of social policy legislation the Christian right managed to get to the floor. He was also, like Foley, among the most vigorous proponents of impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. During an appearance on Meet the Press in 1999, Craig sneeringly vowed that he would “speak out for the citizens of [his] state who think like the majority that Bill Clinton is even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.”

  In 2004, Craig joined his conservative colleagues in voting to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, imploring the Senate to “stand up now and protect traditional marriage, which is under attack by a few unelected judges and litigious activists.” Two years later, Craig endorsed a proposed ban on gay marriage and civil unions in Idaho. But in political circles from Washington, DC, to Boise, allegations about Craig’s homosexuality intensified.

  “I don’t agree with the [gay] lifestyle,” Craig told Matt Lauer, the host of NBC’s Today Show, in September 2007. “And I’ve said so by my votes over the years and by my expressions. Have I viewed it as awful? I viewed it as a lifestyle I don’t agree with.”

  In 2006, the Statesman launched a full-time investigation into Craig’s alleged homosexual life, dispatching columnist Dan Popke to dig deep into the senator’s past for evidence about the rumors that had dogged him for so long. Over the course of a year, Popke compiled testimony from five men who claimed they either were propositioned by Craig or had sex with him. One man, David Phillips, said he met Craig at a gay strip club in Washington, DC, in 1987. After having sex at a nearby house, Phillips said Craig handed him a $20 bill and warned ominously, “I can buy and sell your ass a thousand times over. You were never here.” But before the Statesman’s editors were ready to go to press with their story, Craig was arrested.

  On June 11, 2007, Craig ducked into a bathroom at Minneapolis Airport notorious for illicit gay encounters. “This place is THE most cruisy public place I have ever been,” one person wrote about the restroom on the Internet chat room Squirt.org. Another remarked, “This is the best place for anonymous action I’ve ever seen.” The “action” had become such a public nuisance that the Minneapolis police set up a sting to catch perpetrators in the act. Given the dubious honor of leading this dragnet, Sergeant Dave Karsnia sat for hours in a stall while dozens of men relieved themselves nearby, waiting patiently until one of them propositioned him.

  Suddenly, a man hovered before the door of Karsnia’s stall. Through the crack, Karsnia could see that the man, an older, bespectacled fellow with a shock of silver hair, was twiddling his fingers in odd motions and attempting to peer inside. Then the man settled in the stall next door, slid his foot under the stall divider, and bumped Karsnia’s. Next, the man waved his hand under the divider, a coded request for sex. Karsnia flashed his badge under the divider and pointed to the exit. “No!” the man yelped. He met Karsnia outside the stalls and handed him a business card showing that he was a U.S. senator, an important lawmaker named Larry Craig. “What do you think of that?” Craig asked. Karsnia apparently did not think much of it; Craig was arrested and booked for lewd conduct.

  At the police station, Karsnia subjected Craig to a withering interrogation. Craig was lawyerly to the point of self-parody, insisting that his bumping of Karsnia’s foot resulted accidentally from his “wide stance” on the toilet. But he eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct when he was assured that felony lewdness charges would be dropped. He then returned to Capitol Hill as though nothing had happened, keeping his arrest secret from his staff, wife, and family for two months. But when the Statesman obtained court records showing Craig’s guilty plea, the scandal exploded. Craig’s infamous phrase “wide stance” instantly became the universal code phrase for Republican sexual hypocrisy.

  On August 21, 2007, Craig appeared before a mob of reporters in front of the Idaho Statehouse in downtown Boise. With Suzanne, his wife of twenty-five years, standing beside him, her hand on the small of his back, he indignantly declared, “I am not gay. I have never been gay!” Craig claimed his gui
lty plea had simply been “a mistake,” as though he had admitted to committing such an embarrassing act out of confusion. “While I was not involved in any inappropriate conduct at the Minneapolis airport or anywhere else,” Craig said, “I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in the hope of making it go away.” The reason why he pleaded guilty and kept the arrest secret, he insisted, was that he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” conducted by the Statesman . “I should not have kept this arrest to myself . . . because I am not gay!” he said, visibly shaking with anger.

  Whereas Senator David Vitter received a standing ovation from his fellow Republicans upon returning to the Senate after confessing to engaging in sex with female prostitutes, Craig’s transgression invited the wrath of his peers. Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his conduct “unforgivable,” hinting at severe retaliation. Senator John McCain called for his resignation. And Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential candidate, dropped Craig as his Idaho campaign chairman.

  Tony Perkins, who had been one of Vitter’s most unabashed apologists, demanded Craig’s ouster as well. During an August 28, 2007, broadcast of the MSNBC political talk show Hardball, Perkins called Craig’s bathroom stall behavior “a part of a growing problem within the Republican Party, where value voters expect those that trumpet their issues to live by those same values . . . And I think it’s going to be a real hurdle for the Republicans in the upcoming elections.”

  But Perkins’s moralistic rationale for Craig’s resignation concealed a political calculation. If Craig left the Senate, Perkins reckoned, he was certain to be succeeded by a Republican. Idaho was so conservative that one man running to succeed Craig in 2008, a strawberry farmer named Marvin Richardson, attempted to boost his chances by legally changing his name to “Pro-Life.” If Vitter resigned at the moment his transgressions were revealed, however, a Democrat was likely to fill his seat. In its will to power, the movement forgave Vitter for his sins but crucified Craig for committing a hypocritical but legally insignificant crime.