Sodomy Hussein
War in Iraq and religious extremism at home
New
York Press, April 1, 2003
333 7th Ave, 14th Fl., New York, New York 10001
Email: themail@nypress.com
The Gist
By Michelangelo Signorile
So there we were last week, dropping bombs over Baghdad
to liberate its people from a cruel regime, part of a master plan to protect
us against religious extremists. Meanwhile, back in the United States, the
highest court in the land was seriously debating whether or not the government
should continue to barge into people’s homes, haul their naked asses off to
jail and charge them with engaging in sexual acts deemed abhorrent by
religious extremists—a policy that our president has said is just fine and
dandy.
Saddam’s Republican Guard may be tough, but our own
Republican guard, sitting on the Supreme Court, can put up a pretty good
fight, too.
“There is a long history of the state making moral
judgments,” Justice Antonin Scalia, George W. Bush’s favorite Supreme
Court Justice, said, responding to a lawyer’s arguments challenging the
Texas sodomy law and seeking to overturn the Supreme Court’s notorious
Hardwick sodomy decision of 1986. “You can make it sound very
puritanical,” insisting that the state may have good reasons.
Chief Justice Rehnquist added: “Almost all laws are
based on disapproval of some people or conduct. That’s why people
regulate.”
Though it’s likely a majority on the court will finally
throw out the sodomy laws, Rehnquist and Scalia appear to be among the
die-hard justices who will defend them to their deaths, despite faint hope
that Rehnquist has gone through a transformation in recent years. Rehnquist
voted with the majority to uphold Georgia’s sodomy law, allowing states to
continue to ban the act. (Nine states still ban homosexual as well as
heterosexual sodomy, while four states ban only homosexual sodomy.) A
five-four decision, Hardwick was then and remains today one of the stellar
embarrassments for the court and the country. The late Justice Powell later
changed his mind and said that he was wrong in voting with the majority—a
flip-flop that occurred after he learned that one of his own clerks was gay.
Knowing a living, breathing homosexual obviously changes minds.
Or maybe not. Last month, a gay male couple who were
neighbors of Rehnquist’s gave an interview to the Advocate in which they
talked about hanging out with Rehnquist and his wife in their suburban
Virginia neighborhood, baking cookies for the justice and doing other
neighborly good deeds. Rehnquist was apparently so fond of the guys that when
the men put a “for sale” sign up on their lawn, he ran out and told them
they couldn’t leave.
That’s pretty creepy, especially after hearing
Rehnquist’s comments and questions last week. You have to wonder if he
actually thinks that his gay neighbors did nothing more than bake cookies
behind closed doors. He might not have wanted them to move away on their own,
but does he really think it would have been perfectly fine for the cops to
have the power to cart them to off to jail in the middle of the night? We’ll
know the answer to that question soon enough, when the court rules on the
Texas case.
The White House, meanwhile, has officially kept a
distance from the sodomy case. Unlike the high-profile affirmative action case
recently brought before the court, the White House didn’t enter a brief. On
the homo issue, White House strategist Karl Rove prefers to suck up to the
Christian groups under the radar, hoping not to get caught. (This happened in
2001, when he was revealed to have secretly promised the Salvation Army that
he’d help the group discriminate against gays via the White House’s
faith-based initiative program.)
Now a suspicious website called the Presidential Prayer
Team (www.presidentialprayerteam.org)
is asking people to pray to God that the Supreme Court upholds the sodomy law.
“Pray for the United States Supreme Court as they
consider the case of Lawrence v. Texas on March 26, 2003,” the site’s
authors implored readers last week. “The case involves the right of the
state of Texas to declare that certain acts are indeed immoral.”
Though a disclaimer in fine print on the bottom of the
page notes that the website has no affiliation to the White House or the
president, the site no doubt looks official to a lot of its devout Christian
users, complete as it is with photos of Bush and its own version of the
presidential seal. Dick Cheney’s lawyer recently sent a threatening letter
to the operators of WhiteHouse.org, a
left-leaning satirical site that has skewered his wife Lynn—and which also
contained a disclaimer—but there doesn’t seem to have been any complaint
from the White House about the Presidential Prayer Team.
But shadowy websites aren’t necessary to gauge Bush’s
sentiment on sodomy laws, even if the White House has been reticent to speak
about them. And before attributing his positions solely to politics, remember
that in Bush’s born-again world, sodomy is as evil as Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden. As governor, Bush supported the Texas sodomy law, calling it
a “symbolic gesture of traditional values.”
At the 2000 Republican National Convention in
Philadelphia, Bush’s buddy, then Texas Attorney General and now U.S. Senator
John Cornyn, told me, “I honestly don’t think that Gov. Bush would believe
that the [Texas sodomy] law should ever be changed.”
Soon, private sexual behavior may be yet another issue on
which Bush is shown to be to the right of even this Supreme Court.
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