Hasty Notions on the Latest GOP Gay-Sex Scandal

I’m torn about my stance on the latest anti-marriage-rights GOP man to solicit sex from a younger man. His name is Phillip Hinkle, and he’s a state senator in Indiana, and, according to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, he “voted this year in favor of a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as being only between one man and one woman.”

Folks will probably start calling this guy a hypocrite, but I’m not sure he is. He’s an asshole, that much is certain, but look here (all info from Wikipedia, sorry):

  • Larry Craig — former Republican politician from Idaho, served 18 years in the U.S. Senate, preceded by 10 years in the U.S. House. Arrested for lewd conduct in the men’s restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on June 11, 2007.
  • Ted Haggard — leader of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) from 2003 until November 2006—the same three-year span that he paid escort and masseur Mike Jones for sex.
  • Mark Foley — former representative of the 16th District of Florida as a member of the Republican Party. Foley resigned from Congress on September 29, 2006 after allegations surfaced that he had sent suggestive emails and sexually explicit instant messages to teenage men who had formerly served and were at that time serving as Congressional pages.
  • Bob Allen — former Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives from 2000 until 2007. He made headlines in 2007 after being arrested for offering $20 for the opportunity to perform fellatio on an undercover male police officer. in the restroom of a public park.
  • Glenn Murphy Jr. — former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation. Caught performing oral sex on a man who was asleep while the act took place (via The Advocate).
  • Ed Schrock — former Republican politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2001 to January 2005, representing the Second Congressional District of Virginia. Caught on tape soliciting sex from a male prostitute.
  • UPDATE: Roberto Arango — just-resigned GOP member of Puerto Rico’s senate, who posted naked pics of himself on all-gay iPhone hookup app Grindr

It should go without saying that most of these men voted against gay-rights legislation whenever it came up.

Here’s my point: this is always going to happen. Older straight men of power and means have always and will always seek out extramarital sex with younger men. I don’t know how many more of their members are going to have to be caught with their pants literally down before the Republican party is able to see that all kinds of men sometimes want sex with other men, and that they’d prefer not to be persecuted for it.

We can (and should?) talk about adultery on its own, sex and gender notwithstanding. The rationale behind the GOP’s platform on gay rights is about 90% personal disgust, taught to them by their own parents or pastors. (I imagine most of this disgust is feigned for an ignorant voting public.) But they don’t talk about this. They publicly hate the sin and not the sinner but nobody actually believes this. The public 10% is the perennial belief in the historical (and historically dying) mother-father family model. Fred Phelps wants us to focus on the family. And here we see that the GOP repeatedly claims a moral standard they cannot follow in their adulterous and homosexual behavior.

In this way, these men are literal hypocrites. Throw Newt Gingrich in with them—though he hasn’t been caught with younger men (yet).

But when it comes to calling them closet cases, that’s where I get torn. I imagine that a number of GOP members breathed a big sigh of relief when the Supreme Court decided in Lawrence v. Texas to no longer make consensual sodomy a crime. As long as they’re not forcing or paying for it, these men are free to have whatever kind of sex they want to and not worry about criminal prosecution. So they have everything they need. Why vote to extend equal rights to gay people? How will it ever help them?

That’s the problem. Some of us choose to have sex with only members of our own gender. And, let’s not forget, to fall in love and spend our lives with them. This makes us queers. We have (most of) the same kinds of sex that increasing numbers of GOP members seem to, but in being so foolish as combine this sex with love and compassion, we give up any hope for equal rights.

When I came out to my parents seven years ago, my father told me (unhelpfully) that my life was going to be more difficult now, and this is what he was talking about. Gay people are the same as everyone else in what they want, but they open themselves up for general persecution. This is a choice gay people make. Liking men isn’t a choice, but being gay is. I chose to be honest about it, and so when the Phillip Hinkles of the world get caught, I revel in the moral high ground it gives me.

And then I remember that he’s free to marry anyone he wants and I get angry again.

One thought on “Hasty Notions on the Latest GOP Gay-Sex Scandal”

  1. I’m glad I found this. We just got a copy of your Authentic Animal at my library and I just looked you up on a whim (actually I was posting the book on my blog).

    I’m gay, and my Mother said something similar to me when I came out. For starters, being gay isn’t a choice. Being open about it is.

    Secondly, because of their rabid anti-gay stance, Hinkle and men like them ARE hypocrits.

    Thirdly, Newts had so many marriages and extramarital affairs that he has no right to tell me I or you can’t get married to whom we love. If I recall correctly, one of his wives was on her deathbed when he was shtooping his secretary.

    Nice to learn about ya. :)

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