PURITAN NEWS WEEKLY

www.puritans.net/news/

10/25/04

 

 

A WHITE-WASHED SEPULCHER CALLED ‘THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’

 

 

 

By Parnell McCarter

 

 

Sodomites and other sexual libertines hold prominent positions in both major political parties in America.  But while the Democratic Party flagrantly displays its libertine immorality, the Republican Party puts on a different facade, to appease its evangelical Christian base. 

 

The article by Frank Rich excerpted below points out the nature of the hypocrisy in the Republican Party, even though Frank Rich himself sees nothing wrong with sodomy.  But he does see something wrong with the hypocrisy in the Republican Party.  In truth, the prominent position of sexual libertines in both parties is indicative of their moral bankruptcy.  Here are the article excerpts:

 

 

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Frank Rich: America's orgy of schadenfreude

By Frank Rich The New York Times  Saturday, October 23, 2004

 

…In the annals of election year 2004, Oct. 13 will be remembered as the day it rained lesbians in red America. That was when we learned that Andrea Mackris, an associate producer on "The O'Reilly Factor," had filed her sexual harassment lawsuit, charging that her boss had an obsessive interest in vibrators, phone sex and, most persistently, erotic scenarios involving pairs of women. That night brought the final presidential debate, in which John Kerry's description of Mary Cheney as a lesbian so riled the Bush-Cheney campaign, not to mention the easily aghast Washington press corps, you'd have thought the vice president's daughter was accused of enlisting in a threesome with O'Reilly.

 

What has followed since is an orgy of schadenfreude and hypocrisy …

 

Everyone is now busy matching O'Reilly's alleged after-hours oratory - none of which he or his lawyer immediately denied - with his past condemnations of Janet Jackson, wet T-shirt contests and the televised Madonna-Britney smooch.

 

The bad news for Fox is not only that its most bankable cable star could end up in the third-tier broadcasting oblivion of William Bennett, but also that Fox News, handed the kind of story it lives for, could not (more precisely, would not) turn it into a mediathon. So the network made do instead with the parallel soap opera of Mary Cheney. The Focus on the Family politico James Dobson quickly set the tone on "Hannity & Colmes" by accusing Kerry of "outing" the vice president's daughter - a charge duly echoed by others on the right, led, inevitably, by The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

 

To try to prop up its fictional headline "Outing Mary Cheney," The Journal argued that "Mr. and Mrs. Cheney have not kept their daughter's lesbianism a secret but neither have they shouted it to the sky." Huh? Though Dick Cheney doesn't shout anything, he described his daughter as gay on camera at an Iowa campaign appearance this summer. But whatever the Cheneys may have to say about it, The Journal never entertained the thought that Mary Cheney herself has a voice in this matter. She has been openly gay for years.

 

Before the 2000 campaign, she held a job that announced her homosexuality: gay and lesbian liaison for Coors, a public marketing assignment.

 

She later joined the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-rights advocacy group formed as an alternative to the similarly inclined Log Cabin Republicans. From all the outcry over Kerry's invocation of Mary Cheney, with the attendant rhetoric about the evil of exploiting a candidate's "child" in a campaign, you might never guess that the child in question is a 35-year-old woman. Or that she lives openly with her partner, Heather Poe, whom she brought onstage after the vice presidential debate. Or that she is the paid director of vice presidential operations for the Bush campaign.

 

So you have to wonder what motivated the Bush-Cheney brigade to go ballistic over Kerry's "outing" of Mary Cheney after it had ignored not just John Edwards's previous "outing" but also the earlier "outings" by Bush campaign allies like the Concerned Women for America and the Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes.

 

Unlike the Democrats, who spoke respectfully of gay sexual orientation, these right-wing activists trashed the vice president's daughter for sowing anti-family values. But as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, even when Keyes attacked Mary Cheney in August for practicing "selfish hedonism," the same Lynne Cheney, who, "speaking as a mom," called Kerry "not a good man," spoke not at all.

 

To understand what strange game is playing out here, you must go back to the 2000 election. In the campaign postmortems, Karl Rove famously attributed his candidate's shortfall in the popular vote to four million "fundamentalists and evangelicals" in the Republican base who didn't turn up on Election Day: no-shows alienated by the pre-election revelation of Bush's arrest for drunk driving years earlier.

 

The current Bush-Cheney campaign clearly believes that for these voters, Mary Cheney's sexuality could be a last-minute turnoff equivalent to Bush's drunk driving arrest. When Rich Lowry of National Review said on Fox that "millions and millions of people" were not aware that Mary Cheney was gay until Kerry brought it up, it was clear just which four million he was talking about. Kerry, his critics speculate, was deliberately seeking to depress voter turnout among Rove's religious conservatives.…

 

The Republican establishment is rife with gay people - just ask anyone in proximity to its convention in New York - and the campaign doesn't want the four million to know about them, either.

 

Sooner or later this untenable level of hypocrisy is going to lead to a civil war within the Republican Party. “

 

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It is hypocrisy indeed.  But it is hypocrisy that many evangelical Christians choose to ignore, or at least not adequately respond to.  Dr. Kenneth Gentry’s article, entitled “Third Party 2004? A Conservative Christian Concern", is representative of this malady.  Dr. Kenneth Gentry argues conservative Christians like himself should vote for the Republican Party, and not join any third party bandwagon.  His chief reason for voting Republican: “…I believe this election will decide whether or not the homosexual revolution will win…”

 

Does Dr. Gentry expect us to believe that a President (yes, President George W. Bush) who has the distinction of appointing more openly professed sodomites to high civil office than any of his predecessors Democrat or Republican- that this man will stay the tide of the homosexual revolution?  Will a party that gives a prominent prime time position to the sexual libertine Arnold Schwarzenegger really hold back sexual libertinism?  Is the agenda of the Republican Party even remotely like the agenda of Nineveh, when it stayed the judgment of God upon hearing the message of Jonah?  Would Nineveh have survived if this is how she had responded to the message of Jonah?  Is this how Hezekiah and Josiah delayed God’s judgment upon Judah?

 

The Republican Party is a white-washed sepulcher, and it is a vain imagination to think that supporting such a party will halt America’s moral slide.