Lowering the Guillotine

There's been a fair amount of media coverage about the far-right views of University of Utah law professor Michael McConnell, George W. Bush's nomination to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. We've heard specifically about his writings on abortion?"evil"?and his defense of the notorious Bob Jones University; he thinks the Supreme Court was wrong in ruling against tax-exempt status for institutions that practice racial discrimination. (Nice to know he's to the right of this Supreme Court, isn't it?)

But much less has been noted about McConnell's vociferous, antigay record. He wrote a brief filed with the Supreme Court on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America in BSA v. Dale, arguing that it was perfectly reasonable for the Boy Scouts to ban gays as leaders because it was similar to the Scouts' exclusion of alcohol or substance abuse. Yes, homosexuality, in his mind, is another vice we've got to fight against. Speaking at a colloquium on evangelical civic engagement in 2002, McConnell thundered that "the Scouts' traditional ties with schools, national parks, and the military are in jeopardy. Scout supporters must go on the offensive, to highlight the intolerance of gay-rights activists."

Gee, why didn't they just nominate Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson?

McConnell's urge to purge gays is far beyond the realm of the Boy Scouts too. He is against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the relatively tepid and narrow piece of legislation (it exempts religious organizations, for example), cosponsored by even quite a few Republicans in both the House and the Senate, that would prohibit employment discrimination against gays. Don't expect him to vote to uphold such protections at that inevitable time when religious zealots challenge them in court (if the bill ever gets passed).

"This would be the only civil rights law which is preventing people from hiring or firing on the basis of a moral judgment," said McConnell in an interview on NPR.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, led by that indefatigable moral crusader himself, John Ashcroft, has been intent on making sure criticism of McConnell's antigay record is muted. While the Human Rights Campaign and other gay groups criticized the nomination, the Log Cabin Republicans have greased McConnell's ride into the judiciary. Hasting Wyman, a gay syndicated newspaper columnist, notes that Ashcroft's office has been working with Log Cabin Republican leader Rich Tafel to do damage control.

"Ashcroft's public affairs department offered to set up a press briefing with an assistant attorney general on McConnell with members of Washington, D.C.'s gay press corps," he writes. "Not enough gay pressies were available, so the briefing wasn't held. However, a public affairs officer from Justice called me to make sure I had all the information I needed, including a copy of a Log Cabin news release endorsing McConnell."

The Log Cabinite Tafel told Wyman?are you ready??that all of this was "a positive story for the [gay] community." Yes, he apparently saw it as positive because the administration actually came to court?and silence?gay Republicans on the McConnell nomination. I suppose Tafel and his crowd thought it was positive that Joe McCarthy enlisted Roy Cohn, an actual homosexual, to help blacklist other gays in the 1950s?after all, he was showing he could work with gays, right? These people are so enthralled to eat even the most rancid crumbs at the banquet that they don't see the guillotine hanging over the table.

Rosie: The Saga Continues

W eeks after pulling out of her magazine, Rosie O'Donnell was back on "Page Six" last week, now in a flap with publishers Gruner + Jahr about an interview she did with Richard Gere for the magazine's last issue. She wants to make sure it runs without being cut, so she hasn't handed it in. "She's holding it hostage," said someone at the magazine. This was one of many things that "insiders" have said to the press for weeks about Rosie's behavior and her walking out from the magazine.

Let me take the opportunity to add my two cents on the whole Rosie saga. I've had my differences with Rosie, beginning when I criticized her over her Tom Cruise ruminations and she shot back that I was a "moron." (We eventually had a spirited discussion over lunch back in May, though I can't talk about it because it was off the record?even though she told Larry King about it.) Nonetheless, there's something in all of the spin that smells, portraying Rosie as having "snapped" and blaming her coming out as the problem. Gruner + Jahr seemed to begin a campaign to show that all of the problems at the magazine?including the plummeting circulation?were due to Rosie's alleged self-destructiveness and her public revelation that she was lesbian. That part at least has the whiff of homophobia.

David Carr in The New York Times reported that "Gruner + Jahr officials said Ms. O'Donnell was not the person she had played on TV and not the one they struck a deal with last year. They said that they teamed up with a talk show host who had a huge following of middle Americans who saw themselves in the sweet-as-pie television figure who had a visible crush on Tom Cruise. In less than a year, she had quit her talk show, announced she was a lesbian and said she was tired of acting nice all the time." Carr then quotes yet another unnamed source saying, "We believe that when she lost the anchor of that television show, something inside her snapped."

And University of Mississippi professor Samir Husni, known as Mr. Magazine, claimed that one of the reasons for the downfall of Rosie is that the average woman in the foothills of Kentucky or Tennessee didn't want to see anything about lesbian parenting?though the gay-related articles in Rosie were few and far between and certainly didn't dominate it.

Did it dawn on Husni that there are plenty of lesbians in the foothills, as well as mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, aunts and friends of lesbians, as well as single mothers who might have the same issues? I mean, the readership of Rosie was not exactly Christian conservatives, and things have changed to the point where the average person can deal with a lesbian-related article. This is the day and age of Will & Grace, for God's sake.

I'm not going to say that her public coming out had nothing at all to do with the publication's numbers drop (though that's a possibility), but it seems a bit suspect to throw everything on that?like all of the companies blaming Sept. 11 for their financial woes. Rosie's book, Find Me, was a runaway bestseller during the very same months that the magazine was plummeting; her coming out obviously didn't affect the sales, and may in fact have helped. Couldn't Rosie's sudden absence from television?whether she is gay, straight, bi, transgendered or whatever?have been the greater culprit, taking away a forum that blared her celebrity and the magazine's presence into women's living rooms daily? Blaming her coming out of the closet is just way too easy.