There's a saying

That all hatred stems from self-hatred.

In light of the actions of all these allegedly Christian conservative office holders. Most recently the Mayor of Spokane Washington, Jim West. Not only has he been caught cruising internet chat rooms looking for 18 year olds. If you want to read the chat transcripts between a secretly gay Republican mayor and the guy hired by the newspaper to pose as an 18-year-old gay man,click here

I call West and his ilk allegedly Christian, because from my dealings with most real Christians, I have found most to be open honest people who believe they have a relationship with their savior and try to model their lives based on the teachings of Jesus and His disciples. Jesus, by all accounts went where He was needed, when He was in the dens of iniquity, not to cruise for a piece of the action, but to heal and to ease suffering.

In the scriptures, the only time He ever showed anger was when he came into the temple and saw all the money changers. I wonder What Would Jesus Do at an event like last Sunday, all sound and fury about opposition to fundamentalist judicial nominees, complete with Senator Bill Frist making a televised appearance.

I'm betting he'd be pissed, but I never gamble on anything I can't affect the outcome.

My topic, though is on the hatred these extremists have towards non-heterosexuals, when there are so many in charge that are closeted gay.Mayor west, for example, is also being charged with allegedly molesting Boy Scouts when he was a troop leader in the 70's. Mark Morford was a memgber of the Scouts in Spokane at the time and is quite articulate about the events here in his column.
He says

"Just to be perfectly clear, I recall no personal run-ins with West of any kind when I was a kid, save for the positive and the pleasant and the paternal. My memories of that time are admittedly vague and for all I know I was drunk a lot, sneaking rum into my Honeycombs, strung out on Twizzlers and Pop-Tarts and Totino's microwavable frozen pizzas, but I can tell you with all honesty, I have no deeply buried memories. I have no horrific sexual episodes that would only emerge through insidious regression therapy. I had, in fact, a perfectly lovely childhood, despite Boy Scout camp. And I am kidding about the rum."

I agree with him on this bit, because there is some causality.

"And someone should really do a national, once-and-for-all study to back up what everyone already knows -- which is, of course, that the more repressed and sanctimonious and uptight you are about sex and love and gender and religion, the more likely you are to be involved in secret kink, in deep perversion, illegal perversion, perversion that crosses the line from healthy and slippery and delicious to degrading and morally reprehensible and Karl Rove. Just ask -- did I say this already? -- the Catholic Church."

But the thing he points out, which is what I mean by today's title

"Here's what does it. Here's what makes West and people like him rife with potential for, well, some of the nastiest and most dishonest and dangerous abuses humans are capable of.

It's the ability to ignore the incredible hypocrisy of your own life, the staggering amount of self-loathing, the pathetic insincerity. It's the ability to join a political party that not only openly loathes, but actually violently condemns, your choice in sexual partners, a sexually ignorant platform that claims to have some sort of direct line to a gay-hating war-loving God, and then, in the middle of who knows how many gay affairs, to feel no shame as you step right up and endorse that exact same hateful agenda as public policy.

It's the fact that, in West's case, you can still sleep at night after you've voted against gay love and railed against healthy teen sex and bashed women's rights and criticized adult/youth sex when you are, in fact, so confused and lost and deeply engaged in much of it yourself that it's very likely your mangled, hypocritical mind has lost the ability to distinguish between informed, consensual, happily kinky adult relationships and, say, abusing the honest trust of a pre-teen boy. Or, for that matter, many boys.

"Join that party and toe that line and swallow that nasty doctrine and spit it out into the world like oozing red-meat dogma while you secretly use your power to lure in teenagers and men for sex, and I don't put anything past you, Jim. To my mind, you're capable of anything. Anything at all

And for that, my old troop leader Jim, I can never forgive you. "

I know, for example, that many of the elite of the Nazi party were gay. They were of the variety that worshipped the hypermasculine and who hated the effeminate, "degenerates" of Berlin and Paris, yet they used the Bathhouses of Munich to plan their own rebellion. The original leader of the Nazi Youth used his position to pick and choose his own young boys. The "night of the long knives" cut his career short. I just can't remember his name right now.

I have finals looming, else I'd be more thorough.

So, in the New York times, columnist Frank Rich writes "Just How Gay Is the Right?" (here)where he highlights a 1962 movie "Advise and Consent" about how a senator has a secret - he's gay. In the 50's and early 60-'s, in most states, that was illegal, and in others it was considered a mental illness.

He also points out in his article:

"What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995."

Why does this happen, and why is there no outrage in either the conservative movement or the liberal camps when these outings occur. The conservatives pretend nothing happens, and the liberals don't seem to know what to do.

I think Frank Herbert summed it up quite nicely when he said

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts, but rather power is a magnet that draws the corruptible."