In one of those media moments so rare these days, the lid was lifted ever so slightly on the Bush administration mid-January, exposing some of the unsavory goings-on at the Dept. of Health and Human Services. A recent appointee to the presidential AIDS panel, Pennsylvania marketing consultant Jerry Thacker, withdrew his name—under pressure from the White House—after the Washington Post reported on page one that he had in the past called AIDS the 'gay plague,' had attacked the gay 'death style' and had promoted the idea of 'rescuing' homosexuals from their sin.
Those statements, and lots of other extremist blather, had for some time been sitting on Thacker's Web site and on the site of the notorious Bob Jones University—where alumnus Thacker gave an antigay rant in 2001, equating homosexuality with bestiality. The Web sites were expunged of the comments just as news of Thacker joining the AIDS panel came out—a mysterious action that had the whiff of a White House cleansing.
Nonetheless, the president, we were told, was shocked upon learning of Thacker's comments. Just as Thacker was withdrawing his name, Ari Fleischer said at the daily White House press briefing, about the appointee's suddenly public ideologies: 'The president does not share [Thacker's] view; the president has a totally opposite view ... the views that [Thacker] holds are far, far removed from what the president believes.'
Predictably, some gay Republicans were overjoyed by those comments. Log Cabin Republicans communications director Mark Mead called to tell me just how much, emphasizing, too, that four openly gay men had been appointed to the panel.
'We now know where the president stands—and it's 180 degrees from where Thacker stands,' he said with glee.
Perhaps Mead is right, in which case our president is either: 1) a psychotic with a split personality or 2) not in charge of his administration. If number one is true, Bush obviously should not be president. And if number two is true, well, he isn't the president.
I say that because the Bush administration continues to take actions that are in opposition to what the president claims to believe. Bush wants to 'leave no child behind,' but his administration underfunds education programs. He criticizes Trent Lott for his racist remarks, but then brings the racial lightening rod—and Lott buddy—Charles Pickering back as a judicial nominee. He stands firm in the war on terrorism while dangerously cutting and diverting money and manpower to fight it. He says he's a populist looking to help the little guy, and then proposes tax cuts that will substantially help the big guys.
The Thacker appointment wasn't the first time Bushies had thrown gays to the Christian right like red meat to a pack of wolves, only to later profess bewilderment that anyone would think they were insensitive. Back in July 2001, the Washington Post revealed that White House mastermind Karl Rove had cut a deal with the Salvation Army. He'd promised that Bush's new faith-based initiative programs would make the not-so-gay-friendly group exempt from antidiscrimination laws that protect gays. In return, the group would spend a million bucks on Republican lobbyists, including money for a major Bush campaign strategist. The administration responded that it had no such plans—though, actually, only a few weeks ago Bush signed faith-based executive orders that in fact appear to allow the Salvation Army to discriminate against gays exactly as it had been promised in the original, secret Rovian pact.
So, even if Log Cabin's Mead is correct, what does it matter, since his administration often does the opposite of what he says he believes?
Carl Schmid, a more forthcoming gay Republican who worked on Bush's 2000 campaign but has been disillusioned by these kinds of maneuvers, comments that 'Thacker reflects the same views as people in the administration. There are people who are definitely antigay in HHS. I'm glad to hear Bush's words, but there's a dichotomy. The administration is speaking with two voices.'
Or is it? Does Bush really disagree all with Thacker? Or was Thacker just too blunt, not choosing his words carefully enough from the 'compassionate conservative' playbook?
When you strip away Thacker's sensational terminology, his actual policy proposals aren't much different from those of other Bush appointees on the AIDS panel, or those of Bush himself. They may not talk of the gay 'death style,' but their positions on public health are nonetheless anti-scientific, based on moralistic, religious ideologies. The panel's executive director, Pat Funderburk-Ware, is an abstinence-only devotee who gave a notorious speech to the panel last year, calling for promotion of abstinence until marriage to stem HIV—a policy that ignores gay men entirely, since they can't get married, and a policy that is promoted by Thacker as well. Complaints about Ware's speech by some on the panel appear to have led to Ware's being ousted. But she was brought back—according to two members of the panel who say Ware bragged about it to them—when the bilious Christian right leader Dr. James Dobson complained on her behalf to Karl Rove.
The panel's prevention committee is run by conservative Anita Smith, another abstinence-only devotee who has worked to defund prevention efforts targeted to gays. The panel's cochair, Tom Coburn, is a former Oklahoma House member who was among the most antigay legislators in Congress, a man whose voting record surely makes Thacker proud. Coburn has now assigned Gabriel Rotello's book Sexual Ecology as required reading for the panel, but Coburn seems to be set on misusing the book dangerously. Word is that he's enthralled with the first half of the book, which details gay male sexual patterns since the beginning of the epidemic, and doesn't want anything to do with the second half of the book, which calls for government sanction of same-sex marriage.
Coburn even defended Thacker's appointment, saying Thacker's comments on homosexuality were 'irrelevant.' That was a clear admission that Thacker's policy positions, if not his language, are in sync with those of the rest of the panel and with Bush. But like Trent Lott, Thacker's sin was to be honest rather than speak in code, the 'compassionate conservative' way. In George W. Bush's White House, we might call these the policies that dare not speak their name.
