"The right to privacy should not be the right to hypocrisy.  These people who want to demonize other people shouldn't be able to go home, close the door, and do it themselves." (Barney Frank on the practice of outing gay Republicans, hat-tip to my secret lovaaaah, Jesus' General)

I remember when I first stumbled into blogging back in 2003, one of the most contentious topics a blogger could raise was gay marriage.  To put up a post about it was to instigate a long and seething thread where people would trot out their ugliest and most disturbing prejudices.  At the time, I really sort of wished we'd never brought it up, because it made me realize just how disgustingly obtuse and willfully ignorant people could be.  Every time a news story about gay marriage came on the radio or TV, I had to leave the room, because I knew that at any moment, some frothing bigot was going to be on to spout a shit-stream of, like, caveman rhetoric.

It's different now.  Even in the last three years, we've seen a fundamental shift in the public's perception of the issue.  Maybe once the issue got some coverage, people started to see the difference in the men and women arguing for equal rights for gays and the people arguing against it.  Sometimes I believe that the television has caused a deep and fundamental erosion of people's ability to know when they are being lied to, but perhaps I am lamenting the death of that cognitive ability prematurely.  The Great Reich Wing Stink Machine may finally have thrown a rod or maybe, just maybe, people have decided that since the Republicans have lied about everything else, they must be lying about the threat gay people pose to the fabric of civilization.

(But you know, if I ever want to shoot down a concept permanently, to make absolutely certain that the public will roundly reject it, I will ask an oily reptile like Bill Frist to stump for it.  The man could put you off sex and donuts forever just by advocating them.  He has a kind of anti-charisma.  Whatever quality it is that makes Dr. Frist so irresistable to congregations of Rapture-baiters is the very quality that makes him so deeply repellent to the average citizen.)

On this Bill Maher panel, in under three minutes, Barney Frank manages to completely bitch-slap GOP sock-puppet Stephen Moore and on the way by, fires a well-aimed scud-missile at the bullshit hypocrisy and self-delusion practiced by any gay person who works for the Reich Wing.

"There are fifteen year olds in this country today in high school whose lives are being made miserable because they're gay and lesbian.  And people who are themselves gay adults and are enjoying positions of power in Washington who advance that kind of abusive society, no, it has nothing to do with their economics, I find that contemptible."

AMEN, Brother Frank, AMEN!!

And that's the truth of it.  Gay Republicans are as bad as Nazi collaborators.  They are working with the people who would outlaw and exterminate their own kind.  And to any moral person, that would be an untenable position.  They are not entitled to privacy.  It's open season.  I am going to be front and center enjoying every bit of the excruciating personal agony and political destruction that is going to rain down like fire from heaven on outed Republicans.  The only reason that Mark Foley's sexual orientation is germane to discussion of his being a sexual predator is because secrecy and repression lead to perversion and abuse like rain and sunshine lead to grass growing and flowers blooming.  The kind of world the Republicans want where no one talks about what's really going on is a playground for predators.  The more closets there are in the world, the more damage will be done to young people and gay people of all ages.  Period.