Liberals and Their Invisible Homophobia

Before the Don Imus show was canceled last year, New Mexico governor and then Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson used the word maricón, Spanish slang for “faggot,” after the shock jock goaded Richardson by questioning his Hispanic heritage. “Would you agree that Bernard is a maricón?” Imus asked Richardson, referring to his cohost, Bernard McGuirk.

Replying in Spanish, Richardson laughed: “I believe that Bernard, yes, he’s a faggot if he thinks I am not Hispanic.”

Richardson is hardly the only prominent Democrat to engage in such banter. In an excerpt from his book, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner, Democratic strategist Bob Shrum recounts a 1998 encounter with John Edwards, who had hired him as a consultant for his first Senate campaign. "What is your position, Mr. Edwards, on gay rights?" Shrum recalls asking Edwards. "I'm not comfortable around those people," the future senator replied -- though both Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, have since said that the quote was taken out of context.

In October, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign invited Donnie McClurkin -- a notorious “ex-gay” singer and minister -- to participate in its Southern Gospel Tour event in South Carolina. McClurkin claims that homosexuality can be “cured” through prayer and that gay people are “trying to kill our children.” While Obama later claimed that he did not agree with McClurkin about gays, he had no problem giving the performer a platform to preach his bigotry, knowing that such views are widely held among the conservative Southern black voters whose support he needs to win the Democratic nomination.

Also in 2007, Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and hero to liberal bloggers, gratuitously attacked former Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman and California congressman David Dreier, both of whom have been the subject of gay rumors. “He's had three wives, he's a womanizer, he's done drugs,” Wilson characterized the right-wing smear campaign against him. “But then they realized they couldn’t use those because I've never actually denied them. I mean, I'm the first to admit that, unlike Ken Mehlman and David Dreier, I really like women.” And in 2003, Pete Stark, a leading member of the liberal, antiwar faction of Democrats in Congress, repeatedly called one of his fellow congressmen a “little fruitcake” in a meeting on Capitol Hill.

If John McCain had confessed to being “not comfortable” around “those people,” handed a microphone over to the likes of Donnie McClurkin, cast aspersions about the sexuality of political opponents, or just openly called someone a “fruitcake,” the denunciations from liberals would be swift and unforgiving. Yet Democrats in particular and liberals more broadly always get a pass. Indeed, at the time of Stark’s outburst, the Human Rights Campaign defended the congressman by emphasizing that he "is one of the gay community's staunchest allies." Log Cabin Republicans president Patrick Sammon points to the example of the Democratic mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Jim Naugle, who has made a series of homophobic remarks about the many gay tourists who visit his Florida city. Rarely, however, do news stories ever mention that Naugle is a Democrat. “If he was a Republican, every single story about him would have ‘Republican’ before his name,” Sammon says.

The liberal journalist Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, is a particularly nasty example of the liberal homophobe. Two years ago he challenged gay, HIV-positive journalist Andrew Sullivan to prove a claim Sullivan had made about Alterman regarding military action in Afghanistan, offering to pay “$10,000 to the AIDS charity of Sullivan’s choice.” He mocked Sullivan, “who is HIV positive and likes to discuss this fact with reporters,” for his “remodeled bathroom in P-town.” Alterman regularly refers to Sullivan as “little Roy,” after Roy Cohn, the gay aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy who died of AIDS complications. Following Ann Coulter’s labeling Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards a “faggot” in 2007, Alterman said, “Look, the word 'faggot' ... is a word one hears in private conversation quite frequently; she just said it in public.” Makes one wonder what sort of company Alterman keeps.

As odious as this rhetoric may be, it is indicative of an attitude among straight liberals for whom gay rights is not a signature issue. They may be happy to support the notion of gay civic equality in the abstract, but it's certainly not something they're going to go out of their way to do and risk political capital. And if in the course of political debate they have the opportunity to denigrate gays for political advantage (or are forced to contend with a gay person who does not share their views), they won't think twice about saying things that, were they to come out of the mouth of a conservative, would immediately be labeled “homophobic.”