The Republic of T. Archives

More from Arthur J. Finkelstein, the gay Republican operative who recently married his male partner in Massachussets. It seems he’s also behind a new campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Thousands of letters titled “STOP HILLARY NOW!” have gone out over the signature of New York GOP Chairman Stephen Minarik, but former President Bill Clinton today said that he understood the fundraising campaign had actually been orchestrated by Arthur Finkelstein.

Granted, I’m not a huge fan of Hillary’s “shuffle-to-the-right” routine of late, but I think her husband has a point here.

“Actually I was sort of sad when I read it,” he said. “That fellow who used to work for Pataki is doing it. I mean, they give you two stories. One is that he went to Massachusetts and married his longtime male partner and then he comes back here and announces this. I thought, one of two things. Either this guy believes his party is not serious and is totally Macchiavellian in its position, or you know, as David Brock said in his great book ‘Blinded by the Right,’ there’s some sort of self-loathing or something. I was more sad for him.”

In the book Clinton was referring to, the formerly conservative Brock says that when he attacked the left he was expressing his own gay self-hatred.

I know, I know. Gay conservatives get the “self-loathing” bit all the time. But when you’re gay, and standing behind a candidate like George Bush, or working for Jesse Helms, I think the “self-loathing” question is a fair one. I mean, he’s a gay guy, married to his partner, and raising children; both things the Republican party says he shouldn’t be able to do.

Granted, neither of the Clintons are in favor of gay marriage either. Clinton signed DOMA (though the other option would have been to politically “fall on his sword” for us, in an election year) and gave us “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Still I guess I’m still sentimental for those early days of the ‘92 election season, when I first heard Clinton say to a room full of gay & lesbian supporters “I have a vision for this country, and it includes you.” I tend to think that if supporting same-sex marriage weren’t the equivilant of political suicide, Clinton might have gone a different way. After all, you can do the right thing, and still lose.

The Republicans have never has a vision for this country that includes us, and they’re nowhere near close to coming up with one. All their “big tent” talk notwithstanding, the party seems pretty much fully-owned by the religious right at this point. So, doesn’t working for or supporting a party run by people who despise you, and for candidates who don’t think you deserve equal citizenship, automatically entail a certain degree of self-loathing?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 10:53 am and is filed under Gay Rights, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.