Republican Gomorrah Read online

  Craig’s lone Republican defender was Armstrong Williams, a conservative African American talk show host and former aide to Clarence Thomas who had gained renown in 1998, when, during an interview, he provoked Republican Senator Trent Lott to compare gays to alcoholics and kleptomaniacs. Although Williams stopped short of calling for Craig to keep his Senate seat, he implored fellow conservatives to reserve judgment on the senator’s bathroom stall antics. “We are often quick to judge people for their actions, when we don’t know the whole story,” Williams wrote in a column for Townhall , a conservative Web magazine, after Craig’s infamous press conference. “Lewd conduct is wrong, period, but it is impossible for us to know Senator Craig’s character based on this snapshot of his life.”

  But behind Williams’s plea for compassion were transgressions, financial and sexual, of his own. The commentator is best known for accepting a $240,000 bribe from the Bush administration to promote its No Child Left Behind policy in his columns, a sin that he acknowledged as a motivating factor in his empathy for Craig. Less well known, yet more relevant in light of Williams’s frequent public denunciations of homosexuality, was his own documented gay past. In 1998, Williams, a single man, was accused of sexual harassment by a male athletic trainer he had hired to produce his radio show. The trainer, Stephen Gregory, had reported over fifty unwanted sexual advances by Williams, including attempts to grope his penis and buttocks while on business trips. Williams initially denounced Gregory’s charges as “false, baseless, and completely without merit,” but he finally doled out a $200,000 settlement.

  “See, we all make mistakes,” Williams opined in his apologia for Craig. “We all sin, error, and fall short of expectations. To judge and condemn others—even elected officials who should be held to the highest standard—usually just narrows our own heart and achieves nothing.” For Williams, holding public officials accountable for illicit and utterly hypocritical behavior was tantamount to casting the first stone.

  Taking a cue from Armstrong Williams, Craig battled the pressure to acknowledge that he was guilty of behavior he had repeatedly condemned. When the Senate Ethics Committee launched an investigation into Craig’s peccadilloes, he hired star Washington lawyer (and Democrat) Stanley Brand to argue that his arrest was “wholly unrelated” to his official duties and therefore was not worth investigating. In the end, Craig received no more punishment than a letter from the Ethics Committee lightly chiding him for attempting to evade his guilty plea.

  Craig had weathered the storm of scandal, but he had tarnished his party’s image as well as his own. In a ceremony planned before his arrest was made public, he was inducted into the Idaho Hall of Fame, immortalized beside figures from Sacajawea to Senate legend Frank Church. “It’s a sad day to be a Republican,” an Idaho precinct committeeman muttered when he heard of the ceremony. But even if Craig had heeded the call of Republican leaders to resign, his sacrifice would have had no impact on the endemic problem of sexual hypocrisy within the party’s ranks. With or without Craig, the Republican Party had, through its descent into paranoid homophobia, transformed itself into the country’s biggest walk-in closet.

  One month after Craig’s arrest in June 2007, Bob Allen, a socially conservative Florida legislator and co-chair of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, was nabbed outside a men’s bathroom for attempting to pay an undercover cop to allow him to perform oral sex on him. Allen claimed, after being arrested, that he was “intimidated by [a] stocky black guy” in the restroom and offered to fellate the undercover cop so he wouldn’t “become a statistic.” Days later, Glenn Murphy Jr., the national chair of the Young Republicans conservative youth group, a rising star in Indiana Republican circles who advised candidates to use gay marriage as a wedge issue, was arrested for performing oral sex on a sleeping man during a Young Republicans convention.

  In October, Republican Washington State Representative Richard Curtis, a stalwart gay rights opponent, was arrested after calling the police on a gay escort who had robbed him of $1,000 after Curtis refused to pay him for having anal sex with him. When a detective arrived at the scene of the crime, a cheap motel room, he discovered a plastic sack that Curtis had been reluctant to open. Inside, according to the detective, was “a light grey length of nylon rope, a plastic doctor’s stethoscope, and other items I could not immediately identify.” For days, Curtis, married with three children, pointed to his family as proof that he was not gay. But finally, after his escort’s testimony was made public, bringing to light allegations that he was a “freak” who sneaked out to adult bookshops dressed in women’s lingerie, he resigned.

  This bizarre imbroglio occurred in Spokane, Washington, a conservative bastion just across the border from the Idaho panhandle—Larry Craig’s political base. One of eastern Washington’s most influential Republicans, Jim West, had a draconian record during his twenty years in the state legislature, including introducing bills to outlaw gays from teaching in public schools and teenagers from having consensual sexual contact. In 2003, West leveraged his popularity among local right-wing elements to win election as mayor of Spokane.

  But West’s tenure collapsed two years later when he was accused of molesting Boy Scouts and admitted to offering internships to young men in exchange for sex. Tipped off that West had solicited sex from young men by the gay chat website Gay.com, editors of the Spokane Spokesman-Review assigned a forensic expert to investigate the rumors. Posing as a sexually conflicted high school student, the expert engaged West (who registered online as “RightBi-Guy”) in probing conversations until he finally confirmed his identity.

  “I could never be into the gay scene with its politics and all,” West revealed during one online chat with the Spokane Spokesman-Review’s undercover reporter. “I’ve just seen too many guys decide once they come out that it becomes everyone else’s problem to deal with. I’m not into femmy guys.” In December 2005, just months after messages like these appeared on the pages of the Spokesman-Review, disgusted Spokane voters ousted West in a special recall election. The following year, he died from colon cancer.

  There are few documents more illuminating about the mentality of closeted conservatives than West’s online chats. For West and so many other closeted conservatives, coming out was a fad exclusive among self-indulgent, excessively self-reflective semi-men—or, as he called them, “femmy guys.” Despite his privately acknowledged bisexuality, West had apparently decided that gaining acceptance as he truly was, amid the retrograde culture in which he was raised, was an impossible fantasy. West kept his deviant lifestyle shrouded in secrecy while exploiting his public platform to denounce that lifestyle. That was the way it had to be, after all. “If someone hires you to paint their house red, then you paint it red,” West said, explaining his anti-gay voting record. “Even if you think it would look better green.” In the conservative closet, those who imagined the way things might be different were “femmy.” Those who accepted the way things were were still real men. In their own minds they were not even gay.

  “The authoritarian character worships the past,” wrote Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom. “What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.”

  Having submitted to the limitations of the past and internalized the nostalgia that has become so intrinsic to modern Republicanism, closeted conservatives carefully modeled their public identity after images of the rugged Middle American Everyman: a pastiche of icons from John Wayne to Rambo, from the Marlboro Man to Rock Hudson. Only by inhabiting alter egos (Maf54, RightBi-Guy) or as the anonymous, silver-haired man trolling airport bathrooms and patronizing male prostitutes with false identities (such as “Jeff Gannon” and “Rod Majors”) have closeted conservatives been able to fulfill the essential urges they have denied themselves. But these secret identities, modeled after the hypersexual, leather-bound
homosexual deviant of the right-wing imagination, are false, too. In the vast gulf between the public persona and the private life of the closeted conservative, there is no moral core. There is no conscience, no self; there is only a void.

  The closeted conservative, sapped as he is of his real identity, may never experience actual intimacy through sexual fulfillment. Sex becomes like a drug, a fleeting rush of pornographic lust that can produce titillation, but never emotional connectedness to another person. Thus he is deprived of the sensation of true love, the most life-affirming experience there is. Self-destruction, then, is the leitmotif of the closeted conservative.

  “The more the drive toward life is thwarted,” Fromm wrote, “the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”

  None of the radical right’s myriad sex scandals generated a greater spectacle of self-destructiveness than the downfall of Ted Haggard. Haggard, a right-wing Colorado Springs-based mega-church pastor, confidant to James Dobson, and outside advisor to the White House, was one of the brightest stars of the Christian right’s next generation—and one of its most effective crusaders against gay rights. Haggard’s alter ego, Art, however, was a patron of gay prostitutes, a purchaser of methamphetamines, and an avid viewer of hardcore porn. The exposure of Haggard’s hypocrisy, and the campaign by Dobson’s minions to restore his image, paved a trail of carnage that culminated in a paroxysm of mass murder in the parking lot of the church he had founded.

  CHAPTER 19

  PASTOR TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

  With a mane of sandy hair and a perpetual toothy grin painted across his face, Ted Haggard looked exceptionally youthful even as he settled into late middle age. He was approachable and unfailingly ebullient about sharing the Gospel, a refreshing contrast to mercurial figures such as James Dobson. Haggard even seemed progressive, popularizing the concept of “creation care,” a Christianized environmental awareness initiative that asserted a biblical imperative for reducing global warming. As Dobson marshaled his ornery allies to denounce the notion of global warming, Haggard lapped up attention from secular pundits eager to tout the birth of a new generation of cosmopolitan evangelicals.

  In the wake of September 11, when many evangelical ministers, such as Billy Graham’s son Franklin, lashed out at Muslims—Graham called Islam an “evil and wicked religion”—Haggard was restrained, even criticizing Graham for placing the lives of missionaries in the Middle East at risk. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof praised Haggard for “moving toward religious civility.” “Haggard and other evangelical leaders don’t seem to disagree fundamentally with the loudmouths,” Kristof said, “they just think that insults make bad public relations and put missionaries at risk.”

  Haggard’s base for his mounting influence was the 11,000 members of his New Life Church, located just down the road from Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs. Every Sunday, Haggard whipped up his flock to let inhibitions go, urging worshippers to dance wildly to the top-flight Christian pop ensembles he brought to town, to run up and down the aisles, speak in tongues, and shower complete strangers with hugs and Jesus-loves-you’s so that they might end up submerged in the church’s digitally temperature-controlled, cross-shaped baptismal pool at afternoon’s end. With over 7,000 seats, a Starbucks-style coffee shop, and a cavernous cafeteria, New Life was more than a place of worship. It was a prefabricated community offering an instant sense of solidarity to uprooted residents of the exurban landscape of faceless strip malls and subdivision housing that had sprung up to accommodate their mass migration from places not as spiritually afire as Colorado Springs.

  Upholding a doctrine of “spiritual warfare” at the heart of his social gospel, Haggard established his church as a sacred bastion against the headshops, kebab spots, and gay bars that dotted downtown Colorado Springs—remnants of the Age of Aquarius before the city became what Haggard called “a Vatican for evangelical Christians.” “When I arrived here Christians were discouraged and passive,” Haggard told a reporter in 1995. “There was a very active but behind-the-scenes satanic community here, covens, thousands of Satanists, sixties leftovers into really bloody Satanism. But we either won them over to Christ or they felt the shift in energy and just left town. What we have here is a miracle.”

  Haggard told another reporter the following year, “People would try to escape from covens and tell us about the struggle to get out. I have an interest in satanic meetings. If people are going to covens, I have more of an interest.”

  Haggard’s miraculous makeover began with a hallucination when he was in high school. His father was a veterinarian in Delphi, Indiana, who was born again during a convalescence watching a Billy Graham revival on television. At the age of seventeen, the newly born-again Haggard was seized by a vision of demons hovering over newborn infants, infecting them with the urge to abuse narcotics and masturbate. Haggard attended evangelical Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma (and was rewarded for going there by his father with a new Chevrolet). At Oral Roberts he learned to speak in tongues; a course called “Evangelicals in Communist Countries” inspired his mission to spread the gospel. He married another student, Gayle Alcorn, whose father was an Air Force colonel. Eventually they had five children.

  In 1984, while on a four-day fast on a mountain 14,000 feet above Colorado Springs, visiting his wife’s retired father, another vision appeared to him. In his nutrition-deprived delirium, he beheld a stadium throbbing with men—all were men—engaged in charismatic worship. “I saw thousands of people going into the world as missionaries,” he said. Within a year, his vision began to be realized, though not exactly before the throngs he had imagined.

  A year afterward, in a Colorado Springs basement church, Haggard was hollering sermons from a stack of five-gallon buckets while two-dozen people, his congregation, sat in lawn chairs clapping, singing, and speaking in tongues. His flock prayed outside gay bars for the damned souls inside, they prayed over the names of randomly selected people in the phone book, and Haggard dispatched his “prayer teams” into the pagan-infested streets to anoint major intersections with a garden sprayer and cooking oil. New Life expanded practically overnight, filling its pews with squares and misfits alike, all eager to be saved through Haggard’s unique charisma.

  By the mid-1990s, New Life was not only the largest church in town but also one of the biggest evangelical churches in the country. Haggard moved rapidly to leverage his popularity to finance the construction of the World Prayer Center, a 55,000-square-foot structure designed as a “spiritual NORAD”—the equivalent of the Colorado-based North American Aerospace Defense Command—that would project divine energy to rogue nations around the world. “The World Prayer Center is the final push to make sure the Gospel is available to everyone,” Haggard said in 1993, the year the center was founded. “God chose a time 2,000 years ago, when Rome was the only superpower, to send his son, Jesus. Now, America is the only superpower. That means things are being set up for the end to come.” Four times a year Haggard retreated to the center’s Praise Mountain to listen for the voice of God and receive new visions.

  One of those visions apparently involved Haggard orchestrating the Republican takeover of his adopted city. In 1992, as soon as Focus on the Family relocated to Colorado Springs from California, Haggard organized a grassroots push for Amendment 2, a sweeping initiative that wiped anti-discrimination laws protecting homosexuals off the books. (The Supreme Court overturned the law in 1996). With the backing of Dobson as well as the region’s evangelical pantheon, in 2003 Haggard was elected president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a 35-million-member umbrella organization comprising all of the country’s major evangelical denominations. He became an informal advisor to President George W. Bush, using his weekly conference calls with the president and his advisors to push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a proposal that galvani
zed the Christian right behind Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. By 2005, Haggard himself was contemplating a run for Congress. Although holding elective political office was his lifelong ambition, he ultimately decided against the idea, fearing that a hard-fought campaign would somehow stain his sterling image as a man of God.

  When the judicial battles of Bush’s second term began, Haggard was on the front lines, assailing liberal “judicial activists” at the Family Research Council’s “Justice Sunday II” rally and mobilizing the NAE’s member pastors in support of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. In his spare time, Haggard indulged his personal passion for healthy living, writing a weight loss handbook called The Jerusalem Diet that offered supposedly biblical methods for maintaining an ideal weight. Haggard formulated his diet after a terrible epiphany. “I’m a fat guy,” he shrieked to himself during a 1998 vacation. “I’m getting ugly. My body is changing. I look better in clothes than I do naked! I’m in trouble.” Because he admittedly had little self-discipline—“If interrogators threatened to withhold chocolate from me, I fear I might give up state secrets that would bring the end of freedom as we know it”—Haggard incorporated junk food into his weight-loss plan. After lengthy diet discipline (including the junk food), he claimed he was able to return to his “target weight” and stay there.

  Haggard’s weight loss book was not notable in itself; it was little more than a slapdash compilation of common-sense prescriptions laced with evangelical uplift. The book was remarkable, however, as a document of Haggard’s unusual image within the culture of the Christian right. He was as socially conservative as any of his peers, yet he was unabashedly conscious of his body image. This trait was exceptional, considering Haggard’s role in spawning the evangelical men’s movement, a right-wing cultural phenomenon united by its followers’ desire to maintain a supposedly traditional Christian brand of masculinity. Body consciousness, to the extent that it reflected any hint of assimilation to the values of “the culture,” was anathema to such a men’s movement. Worse, it displayed feminine tendencies, and women, especially those of the single, non-Christian variety, as Haggard taught, were vessels for demonic possession.