The independent candidate for governor in Florida says that Charlie Crist, the Republican candididate, is gay. And he's not just basing the claim on idle gossip - he says he knew the GOP candidate twenty years ago.
According to Linn, during the course of conversations with Crist he learned that the future attorney general is gay. The two talked about “what would happen if [Crist’s sexual orientation] comes out” during a political campaign, Linn said....I've never heard of Crist, and have no idea if he's gay or straight, but I wouldn't be suprised to find out that a GOP gubernatorial candidate was gay. This isn't new. Most gay Republicans I knew in the late 80s and early 90s were closeted - their bosses and colleagues had no idea they were gay. Today, that's totally changed. Gay men and lesbians are out and proud in the highest levels of the Republican party - just take a walk around the RNC or the White House (or George Allen's office) and see if you get out without a date - and their colleagues and bosses know about it and couldn't care less.
Crist, 49, was married for seven months in 1979, but otherwise has lived a single life.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of those colleagues and bosses are still homophobes - at least de facto homophobes versus de jure homophobes (meaning, they may not be bigots in their hearts, but they play one when it comes time to legislate). But having said that, as vice presidential daughter and open lesbian Mary Cheney noted a while back, during the campaign her GOP colleagues would talk to her behind closed doors and tell her how much they supported her being openly gay. Those are not the kind of colleagues who give 100% when Jerry Falwell and the men at the Concerned Women for America come knocking on the door. They may pay lip service to the religious right bigots, but it's hard to believe their heart is truly in the cause of forwarding the homophobe agenda when their best friends and coworkers (and staffers) are openly gay.
That doesn't excuse gay people who work for anti-gay Republican bigots. The hatred that comes from the mouths of Republican leaders is still terribly harmful in terms of the message of hate, and even violence, it sends to the culture at large. But the one silver lining remains that so long as the Republican party secretly embraces its gay colleagues - and it does - the religious right agenda doesn't have a chance in hell of getting anywhere beyond lip service.
But then again, as I noted before, it's not like the religious right has ever demanded anything more than lip service, so up until this point the GOP has been comfortable talking out of both sides of its Bible.
