home > Starting to Sense a Pattern Here?

Lowell

This morning comes word that James E. West, the Republican Mayor of Spokane, Washington, is leaving two youth group boards amidst allegations that he molested two boys and "recently offer[ed] a City Hall internship to someone he met in a gay online chat room" Interestingly, James E. West has long been an opponent of gay rights, including while he was State Senate majority leader.

Why does this story sound familiar? Perhaps because it seems to happen so often these days - anti-gay Republicans being outed (David Brock, Michael Huffington, and of course Virginia's own Ed Schrock), busted for molesting boys (West), caught engaging in sex wih teenage male prostitutes (Robert Bauman) posting sexually explicit pictures of themselves on the internet (Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert), or heading to Massachusetts to marry their longtime gay lovers (Arthur Finkelstein), etc. We could go on and on.

The scary thing is that this list doesn't even take into account all the ultra-moralist "conservatives" who have gotten into trouble for other vices: gambling (former Drug Czar, Bill "Book of Virtues" Bennett), drug abuse (Rush Limbaugh, George W.
Bush), cheating on their wives (Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Guiliani, Rev. Jim Bakker, Neil Bush, Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr ? also caught in photographs licking whipped cream off the breast of a stripper), engaging in sexually "inappropriate"
behavior with female employees (conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly, Family Research Council's Gary Bauer, Republican Congressmen Dan Burton and Dan Crane, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Republican Senator Bob Packwood, - 10,000 pages of evidence against him), and pressuring their wives to perform sex acts in public at sex clubs (former Illinois Republican US Senate candidate, Jack Ryan).

Starting to sense a pattern here? For instance, that the same people who love preaching strict "family values," intolerance, and harsh judgmentalism towards various "vices" are among the biggest "sinners" themselves? Interestingly, psychological studies have shown that the most intolerant people tend to also be the most repressed. One well-known example was the 1996 University of Georgia study, which found that 80% of homophobic men showed some degree of arousal when shown male homosexual videos. In contrast, only 34% of non-homophobic men showed such arousal.

As the lead researcher on the homophobia study, Henry Adams, said back in the February 1997 Esquire Magazine "Men who are upset by being around gay men probably have these tendencies themselves. The thing you dislike most in yourself is the kind of thing you might jump on somebody else for." Wow. Who woulda thunk it? Hmmmm?..