Out of the Closet

It shocked a lot of people to learn that Ken Mehlman, the campaign for George Walker Bush's 2004 presidential bid and the subsequent chairman of the Republican National Committee, is gay. After all, it was Mehlman who was instrumental in rallying Republican voters around supporting laws to ban gay marriage as a method of getting them to the polls to give Bush a second presidential term.

Mehlman says he's really, really sorry for the divisiveness and bitterness he's caused among gays and that he wants to make amends, but no one is accepting his apology. It was because of a gay marriage ban on the ballot in Ohio that Bush won a second presidential term against Democratic presidential nomination over John Kerry. Without Ohio, there would have been no second Bush term, no guys on the Supreme Court named Alito or Roberts (and no Citizens United ruling), and no Brownie overseeing Katrina relief. But even more significant is that Mehlman betrayed his own conscience and his fellow gays in polarizing the nation, scapegoating gays as an enemy of a moral and just people, and making gays feel like second-class citizens.

This, by the way, is nothing new; gay Republicans have happily worked against their own interests to advance their profiles in the GOP. Some people might remember Terry Dolan, a closeted homosexual conservative activist who opposed gay rights and formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the group that helped the Republicans win control of the Senate in 1980 by getting veteran liberals like George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, and Birch Bayh voted out of office in favor of dullards such as, respectively, James Abdnor, Robert Kasten, and Dan Quayle. Dolan's greatest legacy is the method Republicans now use to get people to contribute money. "[You try to] make them angry and stir up hostilities. The shriller you are, the easier it is to raise funds. That's the nature of the beast."

Dolan died of AIDS in 1986.

Ken Mehlman may have perpetrated Dolan's modus operandi, but his own legacy was using the gay marriage issue to get middle-class Americans to vote against their own economic interests. I may have said this before, but it's worth repeating. The choice was defined in 2004 as thus: Either you let gays register wedding presents at Bloomingdale's or compete against your own teenage children for a job at Wal-Mart. Guess which was chosen.

I'm sure Mehlman is seriously sorry for the hostility to minority rights he stirred up as a loyal Republican foot soldier. It's too bad he can't undo the damage now. That's why I have trouble accepting his apology.