Dutifully, Vitter manned the trenches against the onslaught of gay marriage. In June 2006, as the Republican Party sought to energize its Christian-right base for the upcoming midterm elections, Vitter coauthored a bill to ban gay marriage. Even as his constituents reeled from the damage of Hurricane Katrina, Vitter preached on the Senate floor, “I don’t believe there’s any issue as important as this one. I think this debate is very healthy and we’re winning hearts and minds.” Yet many members of Vitter’s party, including Senator John McCain, disagreed, sending the bill to easy defeat.
Just as Vitter seemed to have emerged as one of the Christian right’s bright new senators, and to have outlasted his critics, his career suddenly took a turn for the worse. In the spring of 2007, a woman named Deborah Palfrey, also known as the “DC Madam,” for operating a high-end prostitution ring in Washington, was indicted for racketeering. Unlike Maier, who never delivered on her promise to author a tell-all memoir, Palfrey immediately auctioned off her client list to compensate for the loss of her multi-million-dollar business.
ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross was the first reporter to view the DC Madam’s list. He quickly revealed that U.S. Aid and International Development director Randall Tobias was one of her high-profile clients. Tobias, a darling of the Christian right, had implemented a policy that forced any group accepting government anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution “loyalty oath” and had cut $40 million in aid to Brazil in retaliation for that country’s successful policy of providing condoms to sex workers. Tobias had called the DC Madam on several occasions, specifically requesting that Central American escorts come to his home for “massages.” With the revelation of his secret life, Tobias resigned his position and sank into obscurity.
But the DC Madam’s trail soon grew cold, forcing ABC News reporter Brian Ross to end his investigation. Then Dan Moldea, a veteran true-crime reporter employed by Hustler magazine’s publisher Larry Flynt, purchased the DC Madam’s list, and the investigation gathered steam again. For weeks, Moldea pored over the Madam’s records, cross-referencing name after name with political affiliations. Exhausted and increasingly frustrated with the dearth of high-profile figures on the list, Moldea planned to give up on his birthday. That day, however, he discovered a record of a call from David Vitter to the DC Madam’s agency. When Moldea reported his discovery on the pages of Hustler, Vitter was finally forced to acknowledge that the rumors that had dogged him for so many years were true.
“I didn’t have a crapload of clients,” Wendy Cortez, Vitter’s favorite escort, disclosed in an interview with Hustler. Cortez, whose real name is Wendy Yow Ellis, said that Vitter visited her twice a week for several years at a French Quarter apartment. He instructed her not to wear any perfume or lotion, and even forbade her to shower, for fear that the scent of another woman would pique his wife’s suspicions. She described him as “a clean old man.” When he finished, Vitter took his used condoms along with him, thus ensuring that the evidence would be destroyed. According to Ellis, Vitter told her, “This is my time with you. I don’t want to spend my time anywhere else because I trust you. I know that I can come here because it’s quiet and secluded.”
“He was very quiet, very gentle. To me, he felt like a person who needed somebody just to be there,” Ellis said. The escort explained that her motive in revealing his identity was that he had lied about seeing her. He lacked “cojones,” she said. She added, cruelly, “His penis was very small.”
Now Vitter publicly confessed to employing the DC Madam at a press conference on July 16, 2007. When Vitter made his grand confession, however, he stage-managed it to appeal to the sensibility of the Christian right, emphasizing his redemption from crisis through the wonder-working power of God.
“This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible,” Vitter, a Catholic, read in a prepared statement. “Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there—with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.” His wife, wearing a leopard print dress, sat next to him silently. He took no questions from reporters.
The following April, after being found guilty in federal court of running a prostitution ring, Palfrey, the DC Madam herself, composed a statement of her own. Overwhelmed by the notoriety she gained through her association with Vitter, and horrified by the prospect of a lengthy jail sentence, Palfrey wrote in a note to her mother, “I cannot live the next 6-8 years behind bars for what you and I have come to regard as this ‘modern day lynching, only to come out of prison in my late 50s a broken, penniless and very much alone woman,” She tied a nylon rope around her neck and hanged herself from the ceiling, dying from asphyxiation. While blogs exploded with rumors that Palfrey was killed to prevent her from revealing more high-profile clients, a medical coroner ruled her death a suicide.
Perhaps under other circumstances, Vitter’s morality-obsessed allies might have called for his resignation. And perhaps a Republican leadership concerned about adhering to congressional ethics before the crucial 2008 elections might have joined their call. Indeed, this pressure sealed the fate of Vitter’s predecessor Bob Livingston, the acting Speaker of the House (also from Louisiana), when his philandering came to light on the eve of the House vote on President Clinton’s impeachment. But fortunately for Vitter, his old comrade, Perkins, held the key to his fate.
Perkins rushed to Vitter’s defense. “The American people have shown themselves to be very forgiving toward a public official who admits their failures and takes redemptive steps,” Perkins said in a press release distributed to evangelical news outlets immediately after Vitter’s press conference. “I hope to see David back on his feet again.”
Vitter also found a defender in Gene Mills, head of the local Focus on the Family policy council that Perkins had founded. “Vitter has repented of the allegations,” Mills insisted. “He sought forgiveness, reconciliation and counseling.”
The Reverend Billy McCormack, the leader of the Louisiana Christian Coalition who blocked moderate-Republican efforts to rebuke David Duke during his rise in the state political machine, and who pointedly refused to investigate charges that Duke was selling copies of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf from his legislative office, also joined the chorus of Vitter’s evangelical protectors. “Senator Vitter may well be much more able as a senator now than before because people tend to learn from their mistakes when they are responsible,” McCormack said, invoking the familiar Christian right theme of crisis and redemption. “I will continue to support him fervently.”
Vitter returned to the Senate confident that the expired statute of limitations on his crimes prevented his prosecution. In a meeting of the Senate Republican Conference, he was welcomed with raucous applause from fellow Republicans. Mac Johnson, a writer for the conservative magazine Human Events, channeled the Republican id in a remarkable bit of unintentional humor. “David, embrace your rampant and unabashed heterosexuality and become a shining example of heterosexual identity,” Johnson wrote. “Too long have heterosexual males been persecuted and criticized for who they are. . . . There is just one word for the dark motivation behind Vitter’s outing and that is HETEROPHOBIA!”
Johnson concluded his defiant apologia with a paean to cognitive dissonance. “I’m a huge fan of hypocrisy,” Johnson declared, “since the alternative is apparently a world without standards for anyone, lest someone risk being called a hypocrite. Here is the difference between the average hypocrite and the average liberal: the hypocrite has the common courtesy to be embarrassed about what he does. The liberal thinks what he does should be taught to your children at school.” Suddenly, post-Vitter, moral relativism was all the rage on the right.
Why did Vitter’s allies so casually forgive his sins? Certainly political expediency factored into their moti
ves. Vitter was a fervent culture warrior from a state led at the time by a Democratic governor. If he resigned, his defenders reasoned, a Democrat would fill his seat, and the balance of power in the Senate would tilt even more against the Republicans. But there was more method to their madness than was apparent on the surface. Just two months after Perkins, Mills, and other Christian-right figures leapt to Vitter’s defense, Vitter earmarked $100,000 in federal money to the Louisiana Family Forum, the policy council that Perkins founded and Mills directed. Whether or not the earmark was a financial reward to his two most ardent defenders, it represented at the very least a troubling conflict of interest.
Vitter claimed the earmark would help the Family Forum “to develop a plan to teach better science education.” But in fact, the Family Forum was determined to introduce “origin science,” or the notion that divine forces created the universe, into public school biology curricula. The group’s blueprint, which it posted on its website, was entitled “A Battle Plan—Practical Steps to Combat Evolution,” a paper written by a supposed expert, Kent E. Hovind, originator of what he called “Creation Science Evangelism.”
Who was Hovind? The founder of Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park based in Florida, and of the “Dr. Dino” website, Hovind was the designer of an exhibit demonstrating that humans and dinosaurs have coexisted for thousands of years and that small dinosaurs still walk the earth. Hovind was also a conspiracy-obsessed 9/11 denialist who has said that AIDS, Crohn’s disease, Gulf War syndrome, and arthritis were creations of “the money masters and the governments of the world.” In January 2007, Hovind was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for tax evasion and obstruction of justice.
Even though Vitter eventually succumbed to public protests and withdrew his earmark, his gesture had consolidated his position as a friend of The Family. Just as the Reverend Billy McCormack predicted, Vitter’s redemption made him more determined than ever to demonstrate his fealty to the Christian right. In October 2007, Vitter introduced a bill the Family Research Council had long advocated that banned federal grants to women’s health centers for STD testing, contraceptives, and pap smears. His argument that these services helped provide the overhead for abortion services fell on deaf ears in the new Democratic Congress, however, and his bill failed. But Vitter’s bill was purely symbolic, another token of his gratitude to his masters in the movement.
“The higher one stands in the Party hierarchy, the more attentively is one’s private life supervised,” Czeslaw Milosz wrote in 1951 in his searing denunciation of Stalinism, The Captive Mind. “Love of money, drunkenness, or a confused love-life disqualify a Party member from holding important offices. Hence the upper brackets of the Party are filled by ascetics devoted to the single cause of the Revolution. As for certain human tools, deprived of real influence but useful because of their names, even if they belong to the Party one tolerates or sometimes encourages their weaknesses, for they constitute a guarantee of obedience.”
Like the puritanical Communist Party bosses of Milosz’s native Poland, James Dobson and Tony Perkins have exploited the secret transgressions of figures such as Vitter to ensure their servility. Dobson has even sent his son, Ryan, into the trenches of the culture war, knowing that Ryan’s earnest desire to transcend the sins of his youth guaranteed his conformity to the movement’s mandates. Only through passionate declarations of faith and frenetic political activity can the fallen ones be welcomed back into the movement. Thus they become “human tools,” the most loyal soldiers of the Christian right’s cultural revolution.
Then there are those, such as Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, whose sins may never be forgiven. Craig, who was arrested soon after the Vitter scandal broke for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in a men’s bathroom stall, had committed no worse offense than Vitter. But the object of his affection was a member of the same sex. Perkins and numerous other conservatives who had defended Vitter unanimously called for Craig’s resignation. Was it just homophobia?
Craig occupied a safe seat that would certainly be filled by another conservative Republican. He was as dispensable as one of Newt Gingrich’s wives. Also, Craig, who famously declared, “I am not gay!” at a press conference after his arrest, refused to submit to the evangelical process of confession and redemption, and was therefore perceived as insufficiently obedient and pliable. Finally, figures such as Perkins have been more comfortable in demonizing homosexuals, whom they view as hostile subversives, than in condemning the straight sinners among them. Morality mattered only to the extent that it was convenient.
But the Christian right’s attempts to cast the gay demons from its sanctuary only exposed its contradictions further. The movement’s closet had flown open for all to see, and it could not be nailed shut again.
THE CONFORMISTS
In the mind of James Dobson, a titanic battle is constantly being waged. This conflict is the central front in “a Second Civil War,” an apocalyptic struggle pitting God-fearing straights against libertine gays, manly men against girly men, biblical absolutes against secular evil. Behind Dobson’s Manichaean rhetoric, the reality of the culture war has been shrouded in shades of gray since its inception. Indeed, the anti-gay crusade mixed traditional homophobia with the self-loathing of the many closeted gays embedded within the movement’s political nerve center.
When the Republican Revolution set up shop in Washington, it sold more than draconian anti-gay policies. Droves of closeted homosexuals were placed in key positions in Republican congressional offices, appointed to think-tanks, and honeycombed throughout the conservative media. Inside Washington, they formed an underground within the underground, a semisecret network that mingled on the fringes of Washington’s gay community, working by day to undermine that community’s movement for civil rights. While enabling the Republicans’ social agenda, closeted conservatives earned the respect of America’s most vicious gay-bashers, gaining protection and privilege. Girly men in private paraded in public as manly men among manly men. But at the same time, the danger of exposure loomed as an ever-present threat and made them vulnerable to damning accusations of hypocrisy. That fundamental hypocrisy highlights the radical right’s most essential contradiction.
In 1996, Henry Adams, Lester Wright, and Bethany Lohr, psychiatrists and researchers at the University of Georgia, investigated the link between homophobia and repressed homosexuality, surveying over fifty self-declared heterosexual males on their opinions of gays. The subjects were then separated into two groups: homophobic and nonhomophobic. Both groups were shown gay male pornography and were monitored for signs of sexual arousal. (The results appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.) The study revealed that by an overwhelming margin, the subjects who registered the largest increase in penis circumference—those most aroused by gay pornography—also held the most homophobic opinions. The remarkable findings of this experiment suggest a clue to why the modern radical right, the most homophobic political movement in American history, has become a sanctuary for repressed gay men.
The closeted homosexuality of the radical right has been present since the movement’s earliest days. One of the key organizers behind the Council for National Policy, Terry Dolan, was a flamboyant conservative fundraiser who once distributed a flier warning, “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement.” Dolan notoriously said, “The shriller you are, the easier it is to raise money.” He was still in the closet when he died of AIDS in 1987. Dolan’s longtime associate, Marvin Liebman, who helped him organize some of the New Right’s most successful fundraising drives, was also gay. But he rejected the tragic path his friend had taken.
When Liebman, propelled as a conservative for decades by anti-Communist convictions, became convinced that homophobia was becoming the enduring basis for right-wing grassroots organizing, he revealed the secret he had kept hidden for decades. In his 1992 memoir Coming Out Con
servative, Liebman said that his work on behalf of the Republican Party made him “feel like a Jew in Germany in 1934 who had chosen to remain silent, hoping to be able to stay invisible as he watched the beginning of the Holocaust.” Upon the publication of his cri de coeur, Liebman renounced the conservative movement once and for all and vowed to devote the remainder of his life to defending gay rights. Two years later, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, the leaders of the new Republican-led Congress, fulfilled Liebman’s ominous warning, aggressively integrating the Christian right’s homophobic politics into their sweeping social agenda. Ironically, while the Christian right worked to ratify the congressional GOP’s policies, the most industrious cadres were gay conservatives operating within the Republican apparatus.
David Brock, a gay political writer who moved to Washington in 1986 to work for the conservative Washington Times, was far and away the most influential journalist of the Republican Revolution. During the early 1990s, Brock’s exposés of President Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties and his best-selling book-length assault on Clarence Thomas’s accuser Anita Hill (whom he dubbed “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”) earned him conservative rock star status. He became a favorite guest of radio rightists from Rush Limbaugh to James Dobson, and he brought conservative audiences to their feet with his stinging denunciations of Clinton as a chronic philanderer unfit to govern. When the Council for National Policy honored Brock in 1994 with its Winston Churchill Award, however, the searing doubt he had long suppressed began to surface.
Republican Gomorrah Page 20