Frank Rich in the New York Times the other day, gave the Mark Foley scandal some much needed, if incomplete perspective.  I’d link to it but they have it behind their subscriber only firewall…

If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. "What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill," says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. "Across the board gay people are in leadership positions." Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from "The Architect," the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.

So will Kirk Fordham, the former Congressional aide who worked not only for Mark Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family’s "recorded history" was gay) and Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the "radical homosexual agenda"). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who brought up incest and "man-on-dog" sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has employed a gay director of communications. In the G.O.P. such switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.

Just so.  When the Log Cabin republicans start yapping that the republican party isn’t as homophobic as the democrats paint it, they’re right as far as it goes.  In much of the party machine, the gay bashing is purely opportunistic.  But that doesn’t make it better.  It makes it worse.  They know gay people…they work with gay people every day.  They know what contributions we make to our country, to our communities, to our neighbors.  They know from first hand day to day experience the humanity of the people they are throwing to the wolves every election cycle for votes.  Yet they do it anyway.

And now the story in the news media is about how the republicans have been playing the religious right for votes all along.  Well imagine that…

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft….

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there, or rather, it doesn’t Begin there.  On a Sixty Minutes interview the other day, Kuo delicately as possible for someone in his position, cast a glance at it…

Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from "the base," the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.

"You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell," Kuo remarked. "Not a mention of the poor."

"This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference," says Kuo

Via Pam’s House Blend, you can get an even better look.  Condi Rice recently swore in openly gay Mark Dybul as Global AIDS Coordinator.  What was all the more remarkable, coming from an administration that has cynically perfected the art of gay bashing for votes, the ceremony was conducted with Mark’s partner Jason right there next to him, and Jason’s mother in the audience, who Rice referred to in her remarks as Mark’s mother-in-law.

Pam gives us a link to the fit Donald Wildmon’s Agape Press had over it.  Hypocrisy anyone?

A spokesman for a family-advocacy group in Washington, DC, is expressing disgust with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swearing in of an openly homosexual man as global AIDS coordinator 

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…

The ceremony involved Secretary of State Rice and the swearing in of Mark Dybul, an open homosexual, as the nation’s new global AIDS coordinator…

Blessed are they that morn: for they shall be comforted…

An Associated Press photo of the ceremony also shows a smiling First Lady Laura Bush and Dybul’s homosexual "partner," Jason Claire. During her comments, Rice referred to the presence of Claire’s mother and called her Dybul’s "mother-in-law," a term normally reserved for the heterosexuals who have been legally married.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth…

We have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse…

Bless them that curse you…

…for her to treat his partner like a spouse and treat the partner’s mother as a mother-in-law, which implies a marriage between the two partners, is a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act…

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…

According to news reports, in all three cases the men’s homosexual partners held the Bible on which the oath of office was sworn.

And by chance there came a certain priest that same way, and when he saw him, he passed by.  And likewise a Levite…Then a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came nigh unto him, and when he saw him, had compassion on him…

The hypocrisy of the republican party angers me greatly.  But it doesn’t disgust me half as much as the braying herd in America’s suburban tract cathedrals, who would gladly have nailed the one who preached love and peace and concern for the poor and powerless hard to the cross themselves, if they had to spit the nails out of their mouths to do it.