'Decency' and Dissent More Scalias?
And doesn't Bush masturbate?
Surely it wasn't a coincidence. Just two days before the Supreme Court handed down a landmark, sweeping decision favorable
to gay rights, George W. Bush asked Congress to make it easier for religious groups in his faith-based programs to discriminate on
the basis of sexual orientation. From a Rovian perspective, the logic of this move goes something like this:
Send the new position paper, titled 'Protecting the Civil Rights and Religious Liberty of Faith-Based Organizations,' to Congress late
on Tuesday. It hits the news cycle on Wednesday—landing on the front page of the Washington Post—telegraphing to the Christian
right that you're in their pocket. Then, just as gay and liberal groups begin mounting attacks on the draconian plan, a Supreme Court
ruling favorable to gay rights comes down on Thursday, as expected, (and is even more favorable than anyone thought it would be),
taking such groups' attention away from your antigay deeds as they focus on their big victory.
The Christian right, meanwhile, might be placated by the faith-based power grab enough so that they don't get too mad at you for
staying silent on the Supreme Court ruling. And you stay quiet on the ruling because, well, who wants to be too far to the right of this
Supreme Court? Not Bush heading into an election year in which he desires to be seen as a moderate. (Why else did Bush end up
praising the court for its affirmative-action decision, which basically upheld principles that he most likely expected—and certainly
desired—to be struck down?)
A devious plot or not, Bush's push on the faith-based plan was an outrage and another example—a la weapons of mass
destruction—of the president's deceptions and lies, since the administration had previously indicated that it wouldn't allow
discrimination against gays under the faith-based plan. In 2001, when Karl Rove was exposed cutting a secret deal with the Salvation
Army—telling the group he'd help them discriminate against gays in return for the group's spending a million dollars on Republican
lobbyists, including money for a major Bush campaign strategist—the White House backed off.
Now that agenda is back. No matter that the administration didn't file a brief in the sodomy; let's not forget that, as Texas governor,
Bush called the now-infamous Texas sodomy law 'a symbolic gesture of traditional values.' The faith-based push is further evidence
(like we need any) of the kinds of nominees the administration will be offering in battles over Supreme Court vacancies that come up,
particularly now that conservatives are livid over the court's sodomy and affirmative-action decisions. Bush has said that Antonin
Scalia is his favorite justice, and he's likely to try to appoint clones of Scalia to the court. Reading Scalia's dissent in the sodomy
case—which could just as easily have been the majority opinion, had this case come down after Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice
John Paul Stevens retired—that's an even more scary scenario than imagined.
Verbally offering his dissent from the bench, Scalia fired a big salvo on behalf of the Christian right to make sure Bush nominates
hard-line conservatives to the court. It was a clarion call to action and a warning that the Court has 'signed on to the so-called
homosexual agenda' and must now be saved.
Scalia threw out the kitchen sink in the desperate but highly calibrated rant, at one point claiming that striking the sodomy laws
will lead to bigamy, adultery, bestiality and yes, even the dreaded 'masturbation.'
If we're going to start locking up masturbators, we'll be rounding up about 98 percent of the population. I would imagine we'd
need to immediately haul off to jail Scalia's fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. I mean, surely Thomas wasn't just sitting
there idly while watching Long Dong Silver and the other porn videos that the Anita Hill scandal exposed him as having rented, was
he?
Scalia's screed sounded like it came right off the Family Research Council's Web site. He eventually flew into a tirade against
something called 'anti-anti-homosexual culture,' spinning off on a tangent about how law schools have been infiltrated by the anti-
anti-homos and their lot. After criticizing Sandra Day O'Connor for bending to public opinion on the issue of gay rights rather than
staying pure to the Constitution (as he views it), Scalia, so blinded by zeal that he's unaware of his own contradictions, then hauled in
public opinion as a reason to discriminate against people.
'Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters
for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home,' he railed. 'They view this as protecting
themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.'
Scalia didn't address how that opinion is any different from the historical view of African-Americans and other groups as 'immoral and
destructive,' and why the sentiment came to be viewed as racist and discriminatory. He does, however, try to split hairs at one point
about race vs. sexual orientation by implying that anti-miscegenation laws, which the Supreme Court struck down in 1967, were
targeting a class of people, while sodomy laws are targeting an activity.
'No purpose to discriminate against men or women as a class can be gleaned from the Texas law,' he claimed. That's pretty
ridiculous considering that no other class of people would engage in homosexual sex—which is what the Texas law specifically
forbid—except for homosexuals! You could go the other way and argue that miscegenation laws weren't targeting a group but rather
an activity—interracial sex—as the laws were largely meant to keep Blacks and whites from marrying, having children and creating
an alleged mulatto race.
But it is Scalia's claim that the majority of justices are immersed in the culture of elite law schools—rather than the supposed real
America out there somewhere beyond the stark Supreme Court steps—that is really beyond the pale, as if he is not walled off himself
in his Christian right world of dogma and doctrines, speaking at religious conservatives' events and accepting their accolades.
'So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of
that culture are not obviously 'mainstream'; that in most States what the Court calls 'discrimination' against those who engage in
homosexual acts is perfectly legal; that proposals to ban such 'discrimination' under Title VII have repeatedly been rejected by
Congress.'
Of course, if Scalia really wanted to get the 'mainstream' opinion, all he had to do was look at the recent polling of Americans
about sodomy laws, which showed overwhelming desire to have them thrown out. Like all bigots, who often don't have a clue about
how cliched and laughable some of their lines sound, Scalia wrote in closing, 'Let me be clear that I have nothing against
homosexuals.' Yeah, and I have nothing against twisted right-wing loonies who believe the state should lock up masturbators. I just
want to make sure George W. Bush doesn't appoint any more of them to the Supreme Court.
Like Mother, Like Son
I've always marveled at how conservative fire-breathers are able to hawk the notion of a liberal-dominated media when right-wing
pundits dominate most of the talk shows. I just experienced first hand how some of them keep liberal voices off the airwaves by
manipulating weak-kneed producers. I also got further insight into what complete cowards and wimps a lot of conservative pundits
are, and why the liberal pundits who are up against them are usually so bland. The bland types are the only ones the conservatives
will appear with, a la Fox's Hannity & Colmes.
Last week, a producer at Boston's WBUR, an NPR station—the same NPR accused by the right as being at the forefront of the
'liberal media agenda'—was so eager to get in touch with me that she contacted my editors at both New York Press and Newsday
with urgent missives, and also sent an e-mail via my Web site. She was calling from a popular program called 'The Connection,'
hosted by Dick Gordon, and wanted me to participate on a show about same-sex marriage. The other guests would be writer E.J. Graf
and National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg.
Goldberg is the son of the notorious, sleazoid web maven, Lucianne Goldberg, the scheming literary agent who helped expose
Bill Clinton's sex life. If not for his mother's standing among those on the right—and the favors she had stockpiled for being a tool of
the anti-Clinton machine—Jonah would probably be punching data in a terminal somewhere, rather than sitting on talk shows.
As the producer from WBUR was trying to reach me, I was on the air myself, doing my own daily three-hour radio program, and didn't
get the messages until 4 p.m. I returned the calls and accepted. She planned to make arrangements for me to go to an NPR studio in
Manhattan, but also inquired if I could do it from my studio at Sirius Satellite.
But she called back at 6:30 to inform me that I was 'off the hook' for the show: Goldberg wouldn't appear with me. The producer
noted she doesn't usually let a guest 'dictate' who the other guests are, but it was late and thus hard to find another conservative. As I
wrote in a letter about the incident to Jim Romenesko's media news page on the Poynter Institute's site, that sounded pretty bogus.
Finding a conservative pundit to do a radio program is about as difficult as finding a drag queen at gay pride.
According to the producer, Goldberg implied that we'd had some words—even though Goldberg and I have never spoken or even
exchanged so much as an e-mail. He did 'admit,' she said, that I am a 'powerful' gay columnist (I laughed at that one), but that I had
put out 'misinterpretations' of his work.
I'm guessing that one of those 'misinterpretations' was a column wherein I criticized him during the Washington, D.C., sniper
attacks. He had floated the totally unfounded idea that the suspects were really gay lovers, and then gleefully called the capture of the
suspects a possible 'threefer' (because they were Muslim, African-American and, in the minds of Goldberg and his fellow right-wing
smear artists, possibly homosexual).
The other 'misinterpretation' might have been my column exposing one of his editors at the Washington Times, Robert Stacy
McCain, as a member of the League of the South, a racist Southern secessionist group. Goldberg had just spent a week piously
calling on Trent Lott to step down as Senate majority leader because of his racially insensitive remarks, and then found himself
exposed as working for an out-and-out racist. (The folks at the American Prospect's blog called on Goldberg to follow his own advice
and step down from the Washington Times, but he did not—nor did he even respond.)
So, here is a stellar example of how liberal voices are shut out of the so-called liberal media at the behest of cowardly
conservative columnists who spend much of their time railing that the media favors liberals.
After my letter appeared on Romenesko's page, Goldberg responded on the National Review's blog, the Corner:
'[Signorile's] right,' he admitted, caught red-handed. 'I wouldn't [appear on the show with him]. I didn't want to do the show in the first
place but I agreed to and so I was willing to honor my obligation. Then the producer told me late in the day that Signorile would be on
with me. And I said, screw it I'm not doing it. My reason: Signorile is an ass.'
It is the NPR station that is most egregious here, for letting him dictate the show. Goldberg has the right to refuse to appear with
me or anyone else, but if someone being an 'ass' is a good reason not to be appear on TV or radio with them, then he should just
pack and go home, considering who they put on talk shows these days. This is one point where we agree: '[N]ext time the opportunity
comes up,' he wrote, 'I guess I'll say yes to appearing with him, because if I set a policy of never appearing with asses I would rarely
do media and lord only knows how many liberals would refuse to appear with me.'
No, the next time, I imagine, Goldberg will simply make sure his demand isn't let out of the bag (and I'd bet that the NPR producer
is in a bit of trouble). But, at the very least, it's a satisfying consolation that, every once in while, you can shine a bright light on the
doings of these people and watch them scamper like a horde of roaches.
Michelangelo Signorile hosts a daily radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio, stream 149. He can be reached at www.signorile.com
