Policing Gender And Sexuality In 2015
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Policing Gender And Sexuality In 2015
BY AJ TRAGER
Originally printed 4/15/2015 (Issue 2315 - Between The Lines News)
DETROIT - Historically, the LGBT community has had a long and sometimes very violent track record with law enforcement. Throughout the United States, laws requiring people wear two to three items of gender appropriate clothing were common all the way up until the 1960s. These laws most significantly impacted LGBT people, particularly transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. This version of policing gender and sexuality often resulted in police entrapment, police harassment, police raids, violent arrests, beatings, sexual assaults and corrective rape. Perhaps the most famous police harassment event was the one that led to the Stonewall riots in June 1969 in NYC, n event often seen as the tipping point TO the modern LGBT rights movement.
Today Michigan enforces gender and sexuality by maintaining the assumption that heterosexual and cis-gender people are better than lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals. With marriage equality currently absent in the state and no state laws protecting LGBT individuals, discrimination against LGBT people is perfectly legal despite strong efforts from advocacy and ally groups to educate and change this.
"These laws are civil in nature and they affect every aspect of our lives. They collaterally result in criminal consequences for the most targeted and marginalized among us," said Yvonne Siferd at a recent criminal justice symposium held at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Siferd is director of victim services at Equality Michigan. "This vehement belief in the superiority of heterosexual relationships is heavily rooted in our insistence on the gender binary and underlines our belief that we are entitled to police transgender bodies as well as queer people's sexuality, criminally and socially."
In the U.S., laws born out of religious doctrine often prohibited specific sex acts such as sodomy or "un-natural" acts. Even though it was illegal for a married couple to commit sodomy or have oral intercourse too, the effect was solely to police gay and sometimes lesbian sexuality. In the early years of the country, the punishment for these acts was sometimes death. These two laws are still on the books in Michigan despite being struck down in 2003 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thirty-four years after Stonewall, in 2003, the Wayne County Sheriff's Department raided the Power Plant, a private LGBT club in Detroit, whose members were primarily black gay men, lesbians and trans women. Between 50 and 100 officers entered the club and over 350 people were handcuffed, forced to lie down on the floor and detained for up to 12 hours. They were left to sit in their and others' urine and waste, and some were kicked in the head and back, slammed into walls and verbally assaulted. Officers on the scene were heard saying things like, 'It's a bunch of fags' and, 'Those fags in here make me sick.' Like the Stonewall police officers, these officers claimed to be enforcing building and liquor codes.
Discrimination, harassment and abuses like the one at the Power Plant undermine effective policing by weakening community trust, reducing reporting of crimes by victims in the LGBT community and challenging law enforcement's ability to effectively meet the needs of members of their communities.
Nationwide Reports And Statistics
According to the 2013 FBI Hate Crimes statistics, LGBT communities were the second most impacted population for the second year in a row. First place went to people where the hate crime involved their race, the third their religion. These numbers are actually lower than what was reported by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, which reported 2,001 victims and survivors of hate violence in 2013 compared to the FBI's statistic of 1,402. The FBI relies on local law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes and keep up with the federal law, however, the NCAVP relies on the reporting from LGBT community organizations. LGBT survivors of hate crimes prefer to report to LGBT organizations over law enforcement.
"Given the LGBTQ community's past and present issues with law enforcement, it isn't all that surprising," Siferd said. "Another reason for the discrepancy is the ignorance and bias of law enforcement regarding LGBTQ communities, particularly when it comes to trans issues. There is often a culture of victim blaming. 'If you didn't act like that,' or, 'Maybe you were asking for it by dressing like that.' There is also a significant lack of training about LGBT people, culture and issues for law enforcement."
A recent 2015 report released by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law documents ongoing and pervasive discrimination and harassment by law enforcement of the LGBT community, especially among LGBT people of color and transgender individuals.
Key findings from the report have found that more than one-fifth of LGBT people who interacted with police reported encountering hostile attitudes from officers and 14 percent reported verbal assault by the police. Nearly half, 48 percent, of the LGBT violence survivors who interacted with police reported that they had experienced police misconduct, including unjustified arrest, use of excessive force and entrapment. Forty-six percent of transgender respondents reported being uncomfortable seeking police assistance, 22 percent reported that they had been harassed by law enforcement because of bias and 6 percent reported having been physically assaulted by an officer.
"Many law enforcement officers do not understand transgender people at all," said Rachel Crandall, director of Transgender Michigan. "Very often transgender people are treated like they are trying to hide something."
To address such discrimination, President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing issued recommendations to build stronger and more collaborative relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
"Bringing gender and sexuality based experiences of violence by the hands of the law enforcement into the center of our conversations around criminal justice is important. It shows that gender and sexuality are a central axis on which policing takes place both alongside and in service of race and poverty based policing. In other words, the kinds of gender and sexuality based violence by law enforcement is not an isolated instance; it's not a rogue cop," Andrea Ritchie said. "It's fundamental to the institution and history of policing."
Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney and organizer from New York City. She is co-author of "Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States," and was an expert consultant and lead researcher for Amnesty International's 2005 report, "Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States."
"Sometimes the aggression is more subtle and it's more about perceiving someone's gender non-conformity, not being able to put them in a box, someone identifying with a different box than the one they (the police officer) thought they should be in or acting in a way that the police doesn't think a woman should act. It is then subconsciously framed as suspicious or disorderly. And there is so much about policing that is about guts or how you feel about something or someone. And that's how policing gender happens," Ritchie said.
That is where Dani Woods comes in.
Dani Woods
The Williams Institute report singled out Michigan as one of four areas in the country that is training police departments in sensitivity trainings and LGBT awareness, focused on reducing police discrimination and harassment of the LGBT community.
"People tend to tense up when they see the uniform, and they know you're an officer. They throw up the defensive wall," said Dani Woods, the LGBT liaison for the Detroit Police Department.
Woods is a member of the LGBT community and lives in Detroit with her wife. They met in 2005 in the Eastern District, which now consists of the 7th and 9th Districts, and have collaboratively served the force for over 20 years.
"When I was trying to get this position up and running, I was talking to a lot of deaf ears. Nobody really wants to 'deal with it' (the LGBT issue). It is so sensitive that people didn't really want to come near or touch," Woods said.
Many of the cases that the department faces are LGBT related. Woods worked closely with Commander Chuck Wilson and Chief Chester Logan to establish a LGBT liaison position. When Chief James Craig took over for Logan in May of 2013, he made sure that the liaison position at the DPD was a key player in the department.
"He is supportive and very passionate about the community," Woods said. "That opened so many avenues. He has an open door policy, but if someone has an issue, he says, 'Come see me,' and I love that. It's awesome that he's so attentive to the LGBT community."
Woods personally handled the hate crime attack that happened during Motor City Pride in 2014, where a young black man named Christin Howard was beaten by a group of individuals. She also worked closely with other members of the force to bring justice for the body of the trans woman found in Palmer Park last year.
Woods says that her biggest fight is getting people who are victimized to come forward. Some, because they've participated in certain illegal activities like prostitution, feel that they won't be treated fairly by the police.
"I just want to say, 'You're a victim. Something happened to you. Nobody deserves that,'" Woods said. "I can't make them make a statement, and that's one of the hardest parts of my job. Because they are already in a box, they already had their guards up about past interactions with the police or are just feeling as if, 'Because I'm gay, they aren't going to take it seriously.'"
LGBT Police Training In Detroit
In a collaboration between Jay Kaplan of the ACLU and Equality Michigan, sensitivity and LGBT training has begun for one supervisor and two public officers in precincts across Detroit. Around 13 percent of the DPD has gone through LGBT trainings, Woods says, and attributes the small number to lack of general LGBT knowledge within the force when she was first hired in as the liaison. Woods hopes to get the whole department trained by 2016.
"At the beginning, everybody's face is turned up and you can see that they don't want to be there. But it's not just because it's LGBT training, it's because it's hard to get police officers to go to trainings," said Woods.
The DPD goes through what they call a 40-hour block, a week long training that every officer attends annually which involves culture, diversity, legal updates, defensive tactics, the gun range and other activities.
The sensitivity training gives the officers a lot of background of what LGBT means, what the community has gone through, what it's trying to evolve into, what it's like to be LGBT in today's society and provides a description on identities and life experiences. Woods addresses preferred gender pronouns and gender roles in same-sex partnerships and how in LGBT relationships the more masculine presenting partner isn't always the dominant one.
"I take what I know from Equality Michigan, and that's my LGBT half, and then I have to transfer it to my blue half and explain it to the officers. Some understand and carry on; others understand but don't agree. It's going to be sticky until it becomes the norm," Woods said. "We're not robots, but what we're taught is what we're taught. And sometimes gray doesn't fit in. Sometimes it's this or that. Sometimes it's not a possibility for this or that. And some people are stuck in that."
Woods opens her trainings by saying she doesn't want to change the officers and instead is focused on opening their eyes to identities that are evolving in their communities.
"Everybody has an Uncle Larry or an Auntie Sue in their family," Woods said. "Some choose to talk about it, some don't. But at the end of the training, everybody expresses that much of the information was new to them. They get excited learning something new."
Williams Institute Recommendations
The Williams Report suggests policy recommendations for state and city governments in order to improve LGBT and law enforcement relationships, including: non-discrimination policies and zero tolerance harassment policies, LGBT trainings, outreach and liaisons to the LGBT community, citizens complaint review boards and prohibition of discrimination against law enforcement personnel.
The President's Task Force On Policing, at the urging of dozens of women's and LGBT organizations, gave some answers and offered some key recommendations to local law enforcement that would begin to address profiling, not just on the basis of race, religion and ethnicity, but also on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. It would include a ban on tools of profiling that are particularly used against women and LGBT people of color, like the use of condoms as evidence of intent to engage in prostitution related offenses. It's also recommended that departments adopt policies for interactions with LGBT folks to eliminate another kind of sexual violence, like when a police officer cannot decide what gender someone is and they search to determine anatomy.
"Coded laws have been used to effectively police gender and sexuality - disorderly conduct, for example. Here in Detroit it was the annoying persons ordinance that was favored by police in their un-officially named 'Bag-a-fag' operation; that was a sting operation that targeted gay men up until the 21st century," Siferd said. "When someone dares to step outside of what is considered the norm for men and women of the time, and that does change, we punish them socially - sometimes criminally - and readily excuse and rationalize discrimination."
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Cottaging
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Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the sexual behavior. For other uses, see Cottage (disambiguation).
The appearance of public lavatories, like this one in Pond Square, Camden, London, is the origin of the term cottaging.
Cottaging is a UK gay slang term referring to anonymous sex between men in a public lavatory (a "cottage",[1] "tea-room"[2] or "beat"),[3] or cruising for sexual partners with the intention of having sex elsewhere.[4][5] The term has its roots in self-contained English toilet blocks resembling smallcottages in their appearance; in the English cant language of Polari this became a double entendreby gay men referring to sexual encounters.[6]
First Chapter: 'The Other Side of Silence'
or many otherwise well-meaning Americans, homosexuality and its attendant controversies -- gay marriage, military service, AIDS policy, sex education curriculums -- make us think or talk about things we would rather treat with benign neglect. Even though most straight Americans oppose overt discrimination against homosexuals, 7 in 10 think sex between members of the same sex is wrong. A majority viscerally opposes teaching tolerance for a ''homosexual life style'' and seems happiest with a ''don't ask, don't tell'' approach to the entire subject.
hile Loughery has favorites among gay activists (he admires Act Up, for example, and in two marvelous pages sums up the achievements and costs of the group's high-pressure confrontations), he treats nearly all his gay subjects with candor and empathy. Writing about issues and controversies that have called forth some of the most vitriolic rhetoric in modern politics, Loughery manages to be unfailingly, almost astonishingly, sensible. Pointedly noting the whiteness of most gay organizations in the last 30 years, for example, he also observes, quite reasonably, that there has been no reason for gay men to be any less racist than the rest of American society. And in a couple of pages Loughery deftly undoes the late-70's effort in which many gay men engaged in a ''display of groundless self-congratulation'' to portray themselves as wealthier and more educated than the general population and therefore in need of no legal protection.
Warren Goldstein teaches history at the University of Hartford. He is completing a biography of William Sloane Coffin Jr.
or many otherwise well-meaning Americans, homosexuality and its attendant controversies -- gay marriage, military service, AIDS policy, sex education curriculums -- make us think or talk about things we would rather treat with benign neglect. Even though most straight Americans oppose overt discrimination against homosexuals, 7 in 10 think sex between members of the same sex is wrong. A majority viscerally opposes teaching tolerance for a ''homosexual life style'' and seems happiest with a ''don't ask, don't tell'' approach to the entire subject.
''The Other Side of Silence,'' John Loughery's provocative history of gay male life in the United States from 1919 to the early 1990's, will have none of it. His title (from the name of a short-lived gay theater workshop in the 1970's) refers both to the millions of gay lives that have been lived according to a kind of omerta, as well as to those who refused to follow the code and thereby risked their livelihoods and, as in the case of Supervisor Harvey Milk of San Francisco, their lives. But the other side of silence (or discretion) is also speech. By using blunt, nonacademic Anglo-Saxonisms, Loughery, the art critic of The Hudson Review, insures that readers cannot pretend not to know exactly which sexual acts were being practiced, forbidden or celebrated.
The broad outlines of Loughery's story are becoming familiar to historians, if not to the general public. But Loughery goes farther. In ''The Other Side of Silence'' he combines original archival research, mastery of the secondary historical literature, more than 300 of his own interviews and a broad and deep knowledge of 20th-century American letters, theater and film into a narrative that is completely accessible to nonspecialists.
Despite our tendency to think of Victorian sexuality as repressed, dominated by the rigidly separated ''spheres'' apportioned to men and women, that very segregation encouraged a good bit of same-sex physical intimacy. How much of this activity was what our cruder age regards as the ''real thing'' -- genital stimulation -- remains less clear, though with so much smoke in the sources, the odds favor the existence of a substantial amount of fire.
Neither the terms nor the concepts ''homosexual'' and ''heterosexual'' even existed until the late 19th century, when a newly powerful medical profession began defining homoerotic behavior as ''perversion'' or mental illness. Still, the conceptual distinction between homosexual and heterosexual had considerably more force in the minds of clinicians than in the sexual practices of men, even the men who worked for vice squads.
In his opening chapter, for instance, Loughery recounts the juicy story of the 1919 sex scandal at the naval training station at Newport, R.I., in which the Navy ran a sting operation to entrap sailors and their civilian friends (known among themselves as the ''Ladies of Newport'') in homosexual conduct. The most striking part of the investigation, to modern eyes -- and eventually to an embarrassed Department of the Navy -- was the enthusiasm with which the presumably ''normal'' young detectives threw themselves into their work, enjoying (under often explicit orders) a ''fairly staggering amount of oral sex,'' Loughery writes, and admitting, in at least two cases, to ''having had anal sex to orgasm.'' But as long as they were on the receiving end of oral attentions, and on the giving end of anal intercourse, no one considered them ''fairies.'' What was common knowledge within gay communities -- that otherwise heterosexual men, known as ''trade,'' could and did enjoy sex with other men -- has been more or less suppressed in straight life.
The 1920's saw more cultural interest in sexuality, and if that decade's classic pantheon of writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker) seemed to have all but ignored homosexuality, late-20's and early-30's vaudeville, theater and even movies experienced what Loughery calls a ''pansy craze,'' an ''implicit means of acknowledging, exploring and yet containing the specter of homosexuality.'' By the late 30's, however, in the grip of a national ''sex crimes panic,'' otherwise respectable newspapers ran lurid tales of murder, abduction and molestation on their front pages, frequently implying that sexual ''degeneracy'' -- code for homosexuality -- was fueling this apparent rampage. The pansy had become a ''public menace.''
World War II had an immense if contradictory impact on gay life. On the one hand, an estimated 9,000 servicemen and women were discharged ''on the basis of their sexual orientation,'' many of them entrapped and humiliated by ''periodic witch hunts.'' At the same time, thousands of gay men and lesbians discovered one another -- and the fact that they were not alone -- in the military. They also learned that whatever society's prejudices about ''queers'' and ''fairies,'' their ''capacity to survive and function -- and, for some, to excel -- was in no way impaired by their sexual life.'' These lessons of gay men's wartime experience resembled those of black Americans, who also felt, following the war, that ''the genie was not going to be forced back into the bottle.''
The difference was that the postwar years witnessed the rise of a civil rights movement that transformed the country, while the witch-hunting fervor of the 1950's also attacked homosexuals in a less well-known (if in certain respects more effective) crusade than that carried out against the political left. A 1950 investigation by the Senate Appropriations Committee, known as the ''pervert inquiry,'' netted about 200 homosexuals in Government agencies, while dismissals for sexual causes rose dramatically among Federal workers and military personnel.
There were stirrings of dissent and protest, however, and Loughery carefully and empathetically charts the beginning of the Mattachine Society and periodicals like One magazine in the early 50's. Most of the second half of the book is an account of the growth, splintering, trials, successes and failures of the struggles on behalf of gay rights over the past 40 years.
''The Other Side of Silence'' is exceptionally rich history by almost any standard. Loughery appears to have read every novel or play and seen every film in the past 75 years having anything to do with homosexuality. He consistently connects changes in gay life to larger developments in American society. And whether he is describing the Stonewall uprising, the intricacies of gay liberation political strategy, the antigay brutality of police officers in San Francisco (yes, San Francisco) or the sexual joy of the gay bathhouse scene of the 1970's, Loughery writes uncluttered, calm, controlled, exceptionally intelligent prose -- no mean feat these days in a field whose scholarly literature is increasingly prone to post-modernist jargon.
hile Loughery has favorites among gay activists (he admires Act Up, for example, and in two marvelous pages sums up the achievements and costs of the group's high-pressure confrontations), he treats nearly all his gay subjects with candor and empathy. Writing about issues and controversies that have called forth some of the most vitriolic rhetoric in modern politics, Loughery manages to be unfailingly, almost astonishingly, sensible. Pointedly noting the whiteness of most gay organizations in the last 30 years, for example, he also observes, quite reasonably, that there has been no reason for gay men to be any less racist than the rest of American society. And in a couple of pages Loughery deftly undoes the late-70's effort in which many gay men engaged in a ''display of groundless self-congratulation'' to portray themselves as wealthier and more educated than the general population and therefore in need of no legal protection.
By giving voice to those who have been too often silenced in the past, by engaging them in a serious dialogue, by placing their words and their lives in front of modern readers, Loughery has rescued their experience from (in E. P. Thompson's memorable phrase) the enormous condescension of posterity. This extraordinary book will shame anyone who still wishes that gay issues would just go away. Loughery has added a powerful voice to the chorus making sure that speech triumphs over silence.
Warren Goldstein teaches history at the University of Hartford. He is completing a biography of William Sloane Coffin Jr.
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In January, 2012, Michael McFaul, a tenured political scientist from Stanford and President Obama’s chief adviser on Russia through the first term, arrived in Moscow with his wife and two sons to begin work as the United States Ambassador. In Palo Alto and Washington, D.C., the McFauls had lived in modest houses. In Moscow they took up residence at Spaso House, a vast neoclassical mansion that was built by one of the wealthiest industrialists in imperial Russia. Spaso features a vaulted formal dining room and a chandeliered ballroom, where William C. Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador in the thirties, used to throw parties complete with trained seals serving trays of champagne and, on one memorable occasion, a menagerie of white roosters, free-flying finches, grumpy mountain goats, and a rambunctious bear. One guest, Mikhail Bulgakov, wrote about the bash in his novel “The Master and Margarita.” Another, Karl Radek, a co-author of the 1936 Soviet constitution, got the bear drunk. The bear might have survived the decade. Radek, who fell out with Stalin, did not.
On his first night in Spaso, McFaul wearily climbed the stairs, from the stately rooms on the ground floor to the living quarters on the second, and he noticed along the way a wall filled with black-and-white photographs of his predecessors, including the “wise men” of mid-century: W. Averell Harriman, Charles (Chip) Bohlen, George F. Kennan. Every diplomat and scholar who thinks about Russia thinks about Kennan—his mastery of the language, his chilly, and chilling, brand of élitism, and, particularly, his influence on the strategic posture of the West from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet imperium. Kennan, who lived to be a hundred and one, had been Ambassador for only four months when, in September of 1952, Stalin declared him persona non grata and ordered him out of the country.
McFaul had no reason to expect that sort of hostility from the Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev. As a policy expert who served on Obama’s National Security Council, McFaul was a principal architect of the “reset,” a kind of neo-détente with Moscow. When, in September, 2011, Obama nominated McFaul to be his envoy to Moscow, relations with the Kremlin were hardly amorous, but a businesslike atmosphere usually prevailed. Obama and Medvedev did solid work on arms control, antiterrorism efforts, Iran’s nuclear program, and the war in Afghanistan. To the bitter outrage of Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s predecessor and patron, Medvedev even agreed to abstain from, rather than veto, a U.N. Security Council resolution approving NATO air strikes in Libya. But a week after McFaul’s official appointment was announced Putin declared that he would return from the shadows and run for President again in March, 2012. This high-handed “castling” maneuver soured spirits in Moscow, sparking a series of demonstrations in Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere in downtown Moscow. The protesters’ slogan was “Russia Without Putin.”
In the three months between McFaul’s appointment and his arrival in Moscow, a great deal changed. Putin, feeling betrayed by both the urban middle classes and the West, made it plain that he would go on the offensive against any sign of foreign interference, real or imagined. A raw and resentful anti-Americanism, unknown since the seventies, suffused Kremlin policy and the state-run airwaves.
As a new Ambassador, McFaul was hardly ignorant of the chill, but he launched into his work with a characteristic earnestness. “Started with a bang,” he wrote in his official blog. During the next two years, McFaul would be America’s primary witness to the rise of an even harsher form of Putinism—and, often enough, he would be its unwitting target.
William Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and then a deputy to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had, coincidentally, come to Moscow that January, and together McFaul and Burns visited a range of Kremlin officials. McFaul also presented his diplomatic credentials to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The next day, they were scheduled to meet at the U.S. Embassy with some of the best-known figures in human-rights circles and leaders of the opposition. When McFaul saw the schedule, he knew it was part of a traditional “dual-track” diplomacy—officials first, then the opposition—but he was also aware of Putin’s darkening mood. Putin had publicly accused Hillary Clinton of giving “the signal” that sparked the Bolotnaya demonstrations. He was also familiar with McFaul’s biography—his long-standing relationships with liberal activists, the shelf of books and articles he’d published on democratization.
McFaul was nervous about these meetings, but, he said, “I was the democracy guy, so we went forward.” The visitors to the Embassy included some of Putin’s fiercest critics, and, after their session with McFaul and Burns, representatives of state television lobbed accusatory questions at them as if they had just received marching orders for an act of high treason.
That night, Channel One, the biggest television station in Russia, turned its rhetorical howitzer on the new Ambassador. Mikhail Leontiev, an acid-tongued conservative who hosts a show called “Odnako” (“However”), declared that McFaul was an expert not on Russia but on “pure democracy promotion.” In the most withering tone he could summon, Leontiev said that McFaul had worked for American N.G.O.s backed by American intelligence; he had palled around with anti-Kremlin activists like the “Internet Führer,” Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption crusader who had, damningly, spent some time at Yale. (The listener was meant to interpret “some time at Yale” as roughly “some time inside the incubator of Russophobic conspiracy.”) Leontiev also noted that McFaul had written a book about the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, and another called “Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.”
“Has Mr. McFaul arrived in Russia to work in his specialty?” Leontiev said. “That is, to finish the revolution?”
Like any effective propagandist, Leontiev had artfully woven the true, the half true, and the preposterous into a fabric of lurid colors. When I asked him about the broadcast recently, he smiled and shrugged: “What can I say? It was very convenient. McFaul made himself vulnerable and we exploited that.”
Andranik Migranyan, a Putin loyalist who directs a Russian-financed institute in New York, told me, “You can’t come and start your ambassadorship by seeing the radical opposition.” He compared it to a Soviet diplomat coming to Washington heading straight for “the Black Panthers or the Weathermen.”
At first, McFaul took the attack personally, not yet realizing that he was, for Putin and official Moscow, a mere foil. “The shit that Leontiev put out on me—this haunted me for the rest of my time in Russia. I was made out to be the guy who came to Moscow to foment revolution,” McFaul told me. “Meanwhile, I was feeling really bad about this fiasco, and in D.C. the mid-level people”—in the Administration—“were saying, Why is McFaul doing this? It was affirmation of why you don’t send people like McFaul to Moscow. Like I was the one screwing up the U.S.-Russia relationship.”
A generation ago, in 1990, as the Soviet Union was lurching toward implosion—with the economy cratering, the Communist Party unravelling, the republics rebelling, the K.G.B. plotting its revenge—McFaul, a graduate student in his mid-twenties, kept showing up in Moscow’s “pro-democracy” circles, hanging out, asking questions, offering assistance and advice. McFaul was a sunny, eager guy, with a wide-open expression, shaggy blond hair, effortful Russian, and an irrepressible curiosity. He had grown up rough in a mining town in Montana. His mother was a secretary, his father a saxophone player in a country-and-Western band. In Moscow, operating in a culture steeped in fatalism and irony, McFaul was the most optimistic, least ironical young man you’d ever want to meet. He handed out instructional manuals translated into Russian with titles like “How to Run for Office.” He was determined to help establish liberal values and institutions—civil society, free speech, democratic norms—in a land that, for a thousand years, had known only absolutism, empire, and the knout. “That’s me,” he says even now. “Mr. Anti-Cynicism. Mr. It Will All Work Out.”
McFaul was ostensibly in Moscow to write a doctoral dissertation on Soviet-African relations. He was, in truth, bored with the quantitative trends in his field of political science—the stark modellings, ziggy graphs, and game theory that seemed so abstract when all around him was the nerve-racked excitement of revolt, the intrigue of political debate and awakening in meeting halls that stank of cheap cigarettes and wet wool. Moscow at that time was a pageant, irresistible to anyone with even a trace of democratic idealism and fellow feeling for the Russians. The sense of historical drama was unmistakable. “Like being in a movie,” McFaul recalled.
The Eastern and Central Europeans, with their simpler narrative of liberation from Soviet occupation, had already sprung the lock of history—or so it seemed—and now the capital of empire was up for grabs. McFaul was addicted to the excitements of revolution. You kept seeing him at demonstrations on Manezh Square or at Luzhniki Stadium, alongside young activists aligned with groups like Democratic Russia and Memorial; there he was at public forums and meetings where the fevered talk was all about how Mikhail Gorbachev was finished, Boris Yeltsin was the answer, and it was only a matter of time before some form of counterattack would come from the reactionary elements inside the secret services and the Communist Party, the gray, angry men, who saw their footing in the world—their power, their salaries and privileges—slipping away.
When McFaul took the time to read, it was rarely for his dissertation. He lived in a miserable hotel room and pored over Crane Brinton’s study of the cycles of rebellion and reaction in “The Anatomy of Revolution,” Trotsky’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the work of the “transitologists” Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, who explored the process by which one political system transforms into another—anything that might feed his understanding of what he was seeing on the streets and what he was hearing in his interviews with the political actors of Moscow: the radicals, the reactionaries, the manifesto drafters.
McFaul had first visited the Soviet Union in 1983, when he was an undergraduate at Stanford. The Palo Alto campus, with its gleam of wealth, had pushed him to the political left. His summer at Leningrad State University was his first time abroad. He was at ease there. After classes, he met with dissidents and consorted with the fartsovshchiki, the young hustlers of bluejeans and hard currency. There are people who encounter Russia and see nothing but the merciless weather, the frowns, the complicated language that, in casual encounters, they hear as rudeness, even menace; and there are those who are entranced by the literature and the music and the talk—the endless talk about eternal matters. McFaul was attuned to this particular kind of Russian romance. But his unusual immersion in politics made him stand out from his fellow-students. He believed, without reservation, that he could take part in the transformation of the world.
That was his habit of mind, a peculiarly American one. He was an idealist, at once ambitious and determinedly naïve. When McFaul was applying for a Rhodes Scholarship, his interviewer took note that McFaul, along with an intelligent and rambunctious classmate named Susan Rice, had helped lead the anti-apartheid movement on the Stanford campus. They occupied a building, campaigned for divestment. Among McFaul’s academic interests was the range of liberation movements in post-colonial Africa: Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. How did McFaul reconcile his desire to study at Oxford on a Rhodes, the interviewer inquired, with the fact that its benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, had been a pillar of white supremacy? What would he do with such “blood money”?
“I will use it to bring down the regime,” McFaul said. In the event, both he and Rice won the blood money and went to Oxford.
Over the years, as he developed as a scholar, McFaul made frequent trips to Moscow, and, because of his refusal to stay in the library, some Russian officials grew convinced that he was working for Western intelligence, doing what he could to hasten the fall of the Kremlin’s authority. They took his openhearted activism to be a cover for cunning.
In 1991, McFaul was in St. Petersburg, trying to organize a seminar on local government. He found himself doing business with a man from the mayor’s office named Igor Sechin. He and Sechin took an immediate liking to each other. It turned out that, like McFaul, Sechin was interested in Mozambique. They both spoke Portuguese. Sechin never actually said that his familiarity with matters Mozambican came from having been a young Soviet intelligence operative in Maputo, or that he still was a K.G.B. officer, but McFaul knew the score. What he discovered, as they talked, was that Sechin assumed that McFaul, too, was an intelligence agent.
It was an encounter with a certain historical freight: a generation later, when McFaul became Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, Sechin became the president of Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned, hugely profitable energy conglomerate. He would also be the most important counsellor to the same man he was working for way back in 1991: a career intelligence officer and deputy mayor named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
On the day McFaul was preparing to go home, he went to see his academic supervisor in Moscow, Apollon Davidson. He thanked Davidson and said he’d had a fantastic time and was hoping to return in a few months.
“You are never coming back,” Davidson said.
McFaul was shocked. There was a taxi outside idling, waiting to take him to the airport.
“You came here to do one project,” Davidson said, “and you did a lot of other things—and it isn’t going to happen again.”
“There is a file on me,” McFaul said. A couple of decades ago, a Russian friend from perestroika days who is “still in politics” told him, “I just read something disturbing about you that says you are C.I.A.” McFaul denied it, but he could see that his friend was impressed. The file, after all, had been marked “Sovershenno Sekretno”—“Top Secret.”
“In government, I’ve seen the power of getting a file marked ‘Top Secret,’ ” McFaul said.
In 1996, President Yeltsin was running for reëlection against Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of what was left of the Communist Party. After a few years in office, Yeltsin had soiled his reputation as a reforming democrat. There was his strategy of brutal overkill in Chechnya and the way he empowered, under the banner of privatization, a small circle of billionaire oligarchs to soak up Russia’s resources and help run the country. “Democracy” was roundly known as dermokratiya—“shitocracy.” Yeltsin’s approval numbers plunged to the single digits. For months, it seemed entirely possible that Zyuganov, who attacked the injustices of the Yeltsin regime in favor of the old ideology, could win. McFaul, who had established an outpost of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, had attracted attention in Yeltsin’s circles by writing an article about how Yeltsin could win.
Yeltsin was ailing, alcoholic, and often out of sight. He left his campaign largely to shadowy figures like his bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov. In January, McFaul got a call from “a guy—let’s call him Igor—one of Korzhakov’s guys.” They met at the President Hotel, Yeltsin’s campaign headquarters. “The people I knew were on the ninth floor,” McFaul said to me. “He was on the tenth: metal detectors, guys with guns. And he told me, ‘I am intelligence. I work for Korzhakov. I am in charge of the analytic center.’ ”
Later that year, Igor asked to meet with McFaul again. “We need to have a quiet conversation about the elections,” Igor said. “Let’s go out to Korzhakov’s dacha.”
McFaul was nervous, but an intermediary from Yeltsin’s team told him, “You are better off going than not going.” He called his wife, who was in Palo Alto, and told her, “If I am not back by the end of the day, tell the Embassy.”
McFaul met his contact at the Kremlin and got in his official car, the standard black Volga sedan. They reached the dacha, one of Stalin’s old country residences. “The Chechen war was going hot and heavy, so there was lots of security and guys with guns,” McFaul recalled.
Yeltsin’s people engaged McFaul in a long discussion about the elections. As the conversation developed, McFaul realized that they were implying two things: that he was a C.I.A. agent and that the Yeltsin forces might postpone the elections. What they wanted from Washington, they made clear, was “coöperation.” If the election was postponed, they said, they wanted Washington to “hold your nose and support us.”
Finally, McFaul broke in and said, “Hey, I’m just an untenured assistant professor at Stanford.”
Igor replied, “Stop! I know who you are! I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t.”
The experience, McFaul said, “freaked me out.” He told the Embassy about it.
As the election approached, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov and relied on the largesse, the media outlets, and the strategic advice of the tight circle of oligarchs, who had met secretly in Davos and decided that they could not afford to lose their patron.
On Election Day, “the good guys won,” as McFaul puts it. Yeltsin prevailed. McFaul’s book on the subject, “Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics,” is not only dull; it is a whitewash, far too cursory about the shabby nature of the election. When I conveyed that to McFaul, he did not dispute the point, instead saying that the book was “an illustration of the tension between being an advocate and an analyst at the same time.” McFaul said that his academic friends thought the best outcome would have been a fair election; his friends in Russian political circles thought a Zyuganov victory would be a catastrophe, morally worse than a rigged ballot. “I was tormented about that,” he said.
McFaul has written and edited many books on Russia and political transition—some of them useful, some pedestrian, none enduring. From the start, his idealism and ambition lured him away from the library and toward politics and the powerful. He began visiting Washington to talk periodically with members of the Bush Administration, including Bush and Cheney. The Administration’s neoconservatism and McFaul’s liberal interventionism overlapped in the desire to press the “democracy agenda” in the former states of the Soviet Union. In 2004, McFaul counselled the Edwards and the Kerry campaigns.
In late 2006, McFaul got a call from Anthony Lake, who had been the national-security adviser in the Clinton Administration. Lake said that he was putting together a foreign-policy advisory team for “the next President of the United States”—Barack Obama. McFaul told Lake that he was already committed. He was planning to work with Edwards again.
A half hour later, Susan Rice, his old friend from Stanford and Oxford, called him.
“I am part of this thing, too, so get your shit together and join!” she crooned.
“That’s Susan’s personality, and so I said, ‘Yes! Of course!’ The stakes for me were low. Susan had had to defect from the Clintons, and they were tough on her, with all kinds of nasty-grams about people who aren’t loyal.”
Rice had already put in place a kind of shadow National Security Council for Democrats, with various foreign-policy mavens charged with heading up regional directorates. The group was later dubbed the Phoenix Initiative, a name intended to send the message that, in the wake of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration’s Vulcans, American foreign policy, under a Democratic President, would, like the mythical bird, rise from the ashes. Rice declared that the group’s thinking had broken free of the traditional clash in American foreign-policy thinking between realist power politics and liberal idealism. The emphasis was less on big-power politics than on problems like climate change and terrorism, issues that emphasized international institutions and coöperation. Around the same time, Rice and Lake also set up an advisory board for their candidate. McFaul led the division dedicated to the former Soviet Union.
The 2008 Presidential-election contest between Obama and John McCain was mainly about domestic issues. Russia was barely on the agenda—until the summer of 2008, when Russia and Georgia went to war. “McCain wanted more conflict, and we were the ones pulling back,” McFaul said. “That was the whole analytic frame of the campaign. . . . We were on defense.” McFaul was among those who pressed Obama to toughen his language and prevailed.
The episode made an impression. Benjamin Rhodes, a close adviser to Obama on foreign policy, said that McFaul’s scholarly background provided “context” that the President appreciated during the campaign and throughout the first term. They talked about everything from just-war theory to questions of development, and yet, McFaul told me, on the “big debate” over realism versus internationalism, he could never quite figure out Obama. “For Barack Obama, it is essential to end those two wars”—Iraq and Afghanistan—“and this retrenchment is in the national interest,” he said. “What I never knew at the time is where he came down on the question of hard interest versus values.”
During one argument among aides in the White House, McFaul took the position that nations need not wait for the development of a middle class before building democratic institutions. As McFaul recalled, “Somebody said, ‘That’s interesting, but that’s not what the President thinks.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting, but if that is what he thinks he is wrong.’ It was a jarring moment, and I thought I might even get fired.” He recalled arguing with Tom Donilon, the national-security adviser, about the issue. “Donilon would tell me, Obama is not really interested in that stuff. He’s just a realist.” And yet McFaul, who is not shy about suggesting his own influence, pointed out that Obama gave speeches in Cairo, Moscow, and Accra, in 2009, “making my arguments about why democracy is a good thing. . . . Those speeches made me more optimistic, after all those colleagues telling me he is just a realist.”
“Obama has multiple interests he is thinking about,” McFaul went on. “He has idealist impulses that are real, and then impulses about concerns about unintended consequences of idealism. We were in the Roosevelt Room during the Egypt crisis, and I asked, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘What I wantis for this to happen quickly and the Google guy to become President. What I think is that this will be a long-drawn-out process.’ ”
Obama’s advisers and the Washington policy establishment have all spent countless hours trying to square the President’s admiration of George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft—classic realists—with his appointments of interventionists like McFaul, Rice, and Samantha Power. In the end, one leading Russia expert, who has worked for two Administrations, told me, “I think Obama is basically a realist—but he feels bad about it.”
In his first two terms in office, from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin made his priority the reëstablishment of a strong state. He disempowered disloyal regional governors, crushed the oligarchs who did not heed his insistence that they stay out of politics, and obliterated the leadership of the separatist uprising in Chechnya. He took complete control of the main television channels and neutered any opposition political parties. He established postmodern state symbols and an anthem that combined features of the imperial and Communist past. But he was not, foremost, an ideologue. Kleptocracies rarely value theoretical tracts. They value numbered accounts. They value the stability of their own arrangements.
In the heart of the Soviet era, Kremlin leaders, including Lenin and Stalin, wrote scholastic treatises dictating the ideological course for many aspects of life. At the heart of the Communist Party Central Committee was the department of ideology, which laid down the law on everything from the permissible interpretation of history to the dissidents and artists who had to be suppressed, imprisoned, or exiled. By the late Soviet period, though, K.G.B. officers like Putin were nearly as dismissive of Communist ideology as the dissidents were. “The Chekists in his time laughed at official Soviet ideology,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to Putin, told me. “They thought it was a joke.” Putin, in 1999, admitted that Communism had been a “blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization.”
Buoyed by the sharp rise in energy prices, Putin was able to do what Yeltsin had not: he won enormous popular support by paying salaries and pensions, eliminating budget deficits, and creating a growing urban middle class. It was hardly a secret that Putin had also created his own oligarchy, with old Leningrad pals and colleagues from the security forces now running, and robbing, the state’s vast energy enterprises. This almost unimaginably corrupt set of arrangements, which came to be known as Kremlin, Inc., outraged nearly everyone, but the relative atmosphere of stability, in which tens of millions of Russians enjoyed a sense of economic well-being and private liberty, provided Putin with a kind of authoritarian legitimacy.
This relative prosperity and personal freedom was, in fact, unprecedented. For the first time, millions of Russians took vacations abroad, got mortgages, bought foreign cars, remodelled their kitchens, acquired iPhones. The state was indifferent to the way people lived—what they read, where they worshipped, whom they shared a bed with. A sitcom called “Nasha Rasha” featured a gay factory worker in the Urals. “For the States or Sweden, it would have been politically incorrect,” Alexander Baunov, a columnist for the Web site slon.ru, told me. “But for Russia it was a real improvement! No one killed him!” The state media were under close watch by the authorities, and there were occasional arrests to show where the limits were, but there was no return to Sovietism. Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff, called the system “sovereign” democracy.
Nor was Putin aggressively anti-American in his first years in power. He craved membership in the world economy and its institutions. He was the first foreign leader to telephone George W. Bush on 9/11 and offer assistance in Afghanistan. He abhorred the influence of foreign N.G.O.s, thinking that they undermined Russian interests, but he wanted membership in the global club. He even talked about Russia joining NATO. “Russia is part of the European culture,” he told the BBC, in 2000. “And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy.” The spirit of relative amity did not last.
In 2009, after Putin had ceded the Presidency to Medvedev, he hosted Obama at his country residence and lectured the U.S. President on the history of American deceptions. It was an hour before Obama managed more than “hello.” McFaul, who was at that meeting, said, “It was grossly inaccurate, but that is his theory of the world.” Putin demanded that the U.S. cede to him the former Soviet republics—Ukraine above all—as a Russian sphere of influence. He felt that the United States had, in the glow of post-Cold War triumphalism, pushed Russia around, exploiting its weakness to ignore Yeltsin’s protests and bomb Belgrade and Kosovo. Gorbachev had always said that the U.S. had promised that, in exchange for his acquiescence to the reunification of Germany, NATO would not expand to the east. In 2004, NATO absorbed seven new countries—Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states, which Putin took as a particular offense and a geopolitical threat. And then, later that year, came the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, which Putin saw as a Western project and a foreshadowing of an assault on him.
When, after the Medvedev interregnum, Putin returned to power, in 2012, he perceived the anti-Kremlin protests as an echo of Kiev. The demonstrators had no clear ideology, no leaders. They did not extend much beyond the urban creative and office classes. They had neither the coherence nor the staying power of the protesters on other squares—Taksim, Tahrir, Maidan, Wenceslas. All the same, Putin could not countenance them. What he loathes, his former aide Gleb Pavlovsky told me, is spontaneity in politics. “Putin is anti-revolutionary to his core,” he said. “What happened in Kiev”—on Maidan, in 2014—“was for him absolutely disgusting.”
An avid reader about tsarist Russia, Putin was forming a more coherent view of history and his place within it. More and more, he identified personally with the destiny of Russia. Even if he was not a genuine ideologue, he became an opportunistic one, quoting Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Nikolai Berdyayev, and other conservative philosophers to give his own pronouncements a sense of continuity. One of his favorite politicians in imperial Russia was Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Nicholas II. “We do not need great upheavals,” Putin said, paraphrasing Stolypin. “We need a great Russia.” Stolypin had also said, “Give the state twenty years and you will not recognize Russia.” That was in 1909. Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in Kiev, in 1911. But Putin was determined that his opportunity not be truncated: “Give me twenty years,” he said, “and you will not recognize Russia.”
And so now, instead of nurturing the business and creative classes in the big cities, he turned on them. He vilified them on TV; he weakened them with restrictions, searches, arrests, and selective jail terms. He sided now with the deeply conservative impulses, prejudices, and habits of mind of the Russian majority. “There was an idea to gain the support of the majority, to distinguish it from the minority,” Boris Mezhuev, a conservative columnist at Izvestia and the editor of the Web site politconservatism.ru, told me. “This was done harshly.”
Putin’s speeches were full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises, for treating Russia like a defeated “vassal” rather than a great country, for an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. He denounced the United States for its behavior in Hiroshima and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya. He cut off adoptions to America, claiming that “our” babies were being abused by cruel and heedless foreigners. The West was hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and dissolute, according to Putin, so he strengthened his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to reëstablish “traditional Russian values.” He approved new laws on “non-traditional” sexual practices—the so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws. When the feminist performance artists and political activists Pussy Riot burst into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and performed their “Punk Prayer” (“Throw Putin Out!”), the system knew what to do: Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church, denounced them for “blasphemy,” and the courts, an utterly dependent instrument of the Kremlin, handed down a Draconian sentence. More and more, Putin spoke about “traditional Russian values” and of the uniqueness of Russian “civilization,” a civilization that crossed borders.
An ideology, a world view, was taking shape: Putin was now putting Russia at the center of an anti-Western, socially conservative axis—Russia as a bulwark against a menacing America. “Of course, this is a conservative position,” he said in a speech last year, “but, speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyayev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”
One reason that McFaul was surprised by the assault on him is that he thought he was being careful in his ambassadorial role. He never went to demonstrations. He steered clear of Alexei Navalny.
Still, he was hardly a quiet American. Hillary Clinton had called for U.S. diplomats to use social media, and he was especially ardent, maintaining an active presence, in both Russian and English, on Facebook and Twitter. The young liberal intelligentsia loved McFaul for his openness, his availability. Putin’s people thought his behavior bewildering, adolescent, and hostile.
When Navalny was on trial for a trumped-up charge of embezzlement, McFaul addressed him directly: “I am watching.” And when street reporters stalked McFaul and tried to throw him off his stride, he had a tendency to confront, rather than finesse, his tormentors. Considering McFaul’s sometimes shaky grasp of the Russian idiom, this could make him look both volatile and unconfident.
One winter afternoon, he went to call on the human-rights campaigner Lev Ponomaryov, an old friend from the nineties, and he made the mistake of getting into an unruly debate with a “reporter” from NTV, one of the slavishly loyal television channels. He accused the reporter of somehow knowing his whereabouts through illegal surveillance: “Aren’t you ashamed?” At one point, he blurted out that his diplomatic rights had been violated, that Russia “turned out to be a dikaya strana”—a wild, an uncivilized, country. Later, on Twitter, he said, “I misspoke in bad Russian.” He had meant to say that NTV was behaving wildly. “I greatly respect Russia.” He told a reporter, “I’m not a professional diplomat.” It might not have helped that Navalny, Putin’s nemesis, stepped in and tweeted, “I don’t understand McFaul. He’s got diplomatic immunity. He can just lawfully beat up the NTV journalists. Come on, Mike!”
Another time, McFaul went on Twitter to announce in Russian that he was headed to “Yoburg” for an event. He intended a slangy way of saying Yekaterinburg. Unfortunately, yob is the root of the verb for copulation and his tweet came off as “I am headed to Fucksville.”
These awkward moments were gifts for Putin and his circle, who wanted nothing more than to keep McFaul, and, by extension, the Obama Administration, off balance. At one Kremlin reception, where Putin gave a toast in honor of national independence, a Russian friend told McFaul that he should “lay low,” and said, “You are really on thin ice.”
“What do you mean?” McFaul said.
“I saw Putin and he said, ‘What’s up with this guy? He seems like a real rabble-rouser.’ Putin’s message was to be very careful.”
At the Embassy, McFaul was writing deeply pessimistic memos to the White House about the direction of Russian-American relations. At night, he would go up the stairs and see Kennan’s photograph and wonder if he, too, would get expelled from Moscow.
When Obama was reëlected, in 2012, McFaul was among those who pressed him to visit Moscow, to see what business there was to do with Putin. “So the trains started rolling, we got dates, and our job was to develop a substantive agenda to make this worthwhile,” McFaul said. “This was the last push to try to engage on some of these issues, and it all struck out—arms control, missile defense. It got to be where I was having doubts whether the President should come. It looked like chickenshit to me. And I thought that would be a way worse optic than not coming at all.”
Then Edward Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong. The Russians greeted him with barely concealed delight. The summit was off. “And suddenly,” McFaul said, “we were in a different world.”
The imagery of Putinism, with its ominous warnings against political chaos and outside interference, has long been in evidence. All you have to do is watch television. In 2008, state television broadcast a cheesy docudrama called “The Destruction of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium,” which was hosted and produced by Tikhon Shevkunov, a Russian Orthodox priest whose church, the Sretensky Monastery, is just down the street from Lubyanka, K.G.B. headquarters. Shevkunov, who has known Putin for many years, is widely rumored to be the Russian President’s dukhovnik, his spiritual adviser. The film purports to be a history of the Byzantine Empire’s fall at the hands of the perfidious West, and not, as scholars have it, to the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Constantinople in 1453. The film is a crude allegory, in which, as the Byzantine historian Sergey Ivanov points out, Emperor Basil is an “obvious prototype of Putin, the wealthy man Eustathios is a hint at the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, while Bessarion of Nicea is easily associated with another tycoon, Boris Berezovsky,” and so on. Shevkunov’s film was, in effect, about the need to resist Western influence and to shore up central authority in Russia.
Such phenomena are now common fare. The airwaves are filled with assaults on the treachery of Russian liberals and American manipulations. Dmitri Kiselyov, the head of Russia Today, Putin’s newly created information agency, and the host, on Sunday nights, of the TV magazine show “News of the Week,” is a masterly, and unapologetic, purveyor of the Kremlin line. With his theatrical hand gestures and brilliantly insinuating intonation, he tells his viewers that Russia is the only country in the world that can turn the U.S. into “radioactive dust,” that the anti-gay-propaganda laws are insufficiently strict, and that Ukraine is not a real country but merely “virtual.” When I remarked on his delivery, during a recent visit to his offices, Kiselyov was pleased: “Gestures go right to the subconscious without any resistance.”
In 1991, Kiselyov made a name for himself by refusing to go on the air and broadcast the Kremlin line about an attack on the Baltic independence movements, but now he is an enthusiastic, and often vicious, voice in defense of the state.
“I preserved the capacity to evolve,” he told me. “Back then, we believed we could build a democracy without a state. . . . People said, ‘So what, we will just be a collection of little Latvias.’ But society began to change, and I am a reflection of that change.”
Kiselyov worked as a broadcaster in Kiev during the Orange Revolution and recalls being sickened by the upheaval, which he says was sparked by insidious American interference. “Western journalism, in large part, reproduces values,” Kiselyov said. “When I saw the horror in Ukraine and I returned to Russia, I realized we need to produce values. . . . Putin didn’t make me this way. The Orange Revolution did.” As a master of theatrical sarcasm and apocalyptic rhetoric, Kiselyov eclipses Bill O’Reilly, and as a theoretician of conspiracy he shames Glenn Beck. He tells his viewers that, in Ukraine, fascists abound, the U.S. State Department underwrites revolution, and “life is not worth a single kopeck.” But he insists, “The presentation of me as a minister of propaganda is itself a form of propaganda.”
Although Kiselyov denies that he gets direct instructions from the Kremlin, he was appointed by Putin and is under no illusions about what is expected of him. When he goes on an anti-Semitic tirade against an opposition journalist or mocks American officials, he is doing what he was hired to do. He is a wily, cynical man, and well briefed. When we met, he quickly wanted me to know that he had somehow seen a film of a speech I’d given a couple of years ago in Moscow. “You mesmerized the public, you made them zombies!” he said, delighted with himself. “They looked at you the way they would a boa constrictor!”
When I noted that Putin’s tone had changed, he said, “I agree. Putin now talks more about ideology and about the system of values and the spiritual origins of Russia. In this sense, he, too, is a person of tardy development. He became President unexpectedly. He had no preparation for this role. He had to respond to challenges in the course of things. At first, he had to reconsolidate the state. Now he has inspired a new energy that can be drawn from the national character and the system of values that are rooted in our culture.”
Putin, Kiselyov has said on the air, “is comparable among his predecessors in the twentieth century only with Stalin.” He meant it as a compliment.
Nearly a quarter century after the fall of empire, Putin has unleashed an ideology of ressentiment. It has been chorussed by those who, in 1991, despaired of the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness, and who, ever since, have lived with what Russians so often refer to as “phantom-limb syndrome”: the pain of missing Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic states; the pain of diminishment. They want revenge for their humiliation.
“People in the West twenty-five years ago were surprised by how calmly Russians seemed to absorb the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Boris Mezhuev, the conservative columnist, said. “It seemed to them as if we had voted on it! But in no time at all people were told that everything they had worked for was nonsense. They were told that the state they lived in was based on an unfair idea, that ideology was a myth, the West was only a friend—a complete reversal of ideas. The West underestimated the shock. Only now are we facing the consequences.”
There is an air of defiance, even a heedlessness, to Putin’s behavior. As the conservative commentator Stanislav Belkovsky put it to me, “It was clear that the actions in Crimea would lead to sanctions, capital flight, and a deterioration of Russia’s reputation, but nobody supporting the aggression thought twice. The imperial horn has been sounded. But we are a Third World kleptocracy hiding behind imperial symbols. There are no resources for a true imperial revival.”
Nevertheless, the voices of neo-imperialism are loud and prominently aired. One evening, I went to see Aleksandr Prokhanov, a far-right newspaper editor and novelist, whom I’ve known since the late eighties. In the Soviet period, he was known as the Nightingale of the General Staff, a writer commissioned to ride and chronicle the glories of nuclear subs and strategic bombers and to visit the Cold War battlefields of Kampuchea and Angola. He was a panegyrist of Stalin’s military-industrial state and the achievements of Sovietism. “No one,” he told me, “could describe a nuclear reactor like I could.”
Prokhanov loathed Gorbachev and Yeltsin—Gorbachev for his weakness and lack of regard for the Soviet system, Yeltsin for “hollowing out the state.” He not only favored the K.G.B.-led putsch against Gorbachev, in 1991; he was the principal author of an ominous manifesto, “A Word to the People,” shortly before Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his vacation home in Crimea and tanks rolled into the center of Moscow. He began publishing a newspaper called Dyen (the Day), which collected the fevered rants of all the forces in opposition to the democrats: imperial Stalinists, Russia-for-Russians nationalists, National Bolsheviks, ugly sorts who traced Russia’s troubles to “international Jewry,” Masonic conspiracy, George Soros, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Foundation. Somewhere along the line, the paper was relaunched as Zavtra (Tomorrow).
Prokhanov is now in his seventies. In the Yeltsin era, the “democratic” media rarely invited Prokhanov on the air. These days, the Nightingale sings brightly and nationally; he appears regularly on talk shows and prime-time debates, a deliberate attempt by the regime to give voice to ascendant, approved ideas. When a liberal is trotted out to debate him, viewers invariably vote in overwhelming numbers for Prokhanov’s arguments.
“I miss the nineties! They were the best!” he said with mock despair. “I was in the opposition and was alone battling against the system! Now I am part of the system.”
When I asked him if he wasn’t being exploited by the regime, he smiled indulgently.
“Everyone is being used, including yourself,” Prokhanov said. “We give the system a body, a shape. We’ve explained to the system why it’s great, why it’s in a condition of blooming, and that it exists because of God’s will. And the system has been enlivened by this.” Prokhanov admires, above all, Putin’s strength, as a matter of both image and policy.
Putin came to power thanks to Yeltsin, but Putin did not hesitate to put some distance between himself and his ailing patron. Bill Clinton, at the very end of his time in office, visited Putin at the Kremlin, and at one point in their time together Putin led Clinton on a tour of the vast and magnificent premises. (Compared with the Kremlin, the West Wing of the White House is as grand as an Ethan Allen furniture outlet.) First, they visited a gym, full of state-of-the-art equipment. “I spend a lot of time here,” Putin said, body-proud even then. They proceeded down a long hall to another room; this one was gloomy, abandoned, with a hospital bed, a respirator, a cart filled with medical paraphernalia. Putin turned to the President. “The previous resident spent a lot of time here,” he said.
Putin’s displays of shirtless virility may play as a joke abroad, but to supporters like Prokhanov strength and its projection are at the center of Putinism. “Putin prevented the disintegration of Russia,” Prokhanov said, echoing a widely held sentiment. “In him I saw the traits of a traditional Russian ruler. He struck out at the oligarchs who had controlled Yeltsin. They would pour some vodka for Yeltsin, get him drunk, and they ran the country. Putin destroyed the Yeltsin élite and created a new élite from the siloviki”—the leaders of the security services and the military.
During the anti-Putin protests two years ago, Prokhanov attended counter-demonstrations elsewhere in Moscow. “These young liberals wanted to get rid of Putin and practically send him to the fate of Qaddafi. There was an imbalance in political and ideological forces. The liberals dominated everywhere in mass media, culture, the economy, and Putin decided to correct this imbalance and so he began to grow the patriotic forces.”
Prokhanov could read the signals of encouragement, but he does not pretend to see Putin often. (“My connection to Putin is mystical. We meet each other in our dreams. Which is the best place. No one eavesdrops there.”) Together with members of other institutions associated with the Kremlin—the armed forces, the intelligence services, and the Russian Orthodox Church—he started an intellectual group called the Izborsky Club. In the nineties, Yeltsin had called on a group of intellectuals to help formulate a new “Russian idea,” one that relied largely on a liberal, Westernized conception of the nation. It went nowhere. Now, with such notions as “democracy” and “liberalism” in eclipse, groups like the Izborsky Club, Prokhanov says, are a “defense factory where we create ideological weapons to resist the West.” He said the group recently organized a branch in eastern Ukraine, led by the pro-Russian separatists. “The liberals used to be in charge in all spheres,” Prokhanov said. “Now we are crowding them out.”
According to ideologues like Prokhanov, the thousand-year shape of Russian history is defined by the rise, fall, and reassertion of empire. “These empires flower and become powerful and then they fall off a precipice and leave behind a black hole,” he said. “And in the black hole statehood disappears. But then the state reëmerges as the result of some sort of mysterious forces.” So far, Prokhanov explained, there have been four great empires. The first, a confederacy of princedoms with its center in Kiev, was invaded by the Tatars, in the thirteenth century. Then came the Moscovy tsardom, which featured the reign of Ivan the Terrible and was transformed into an empire by Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century. Then came the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanovs, who gave way to the Bolsheviks in 1917. Finally, Prokhanov said, Stalin “took Russian statehood out of that black hole, put the state on its feet, built factories, produced scholars, and won the Great Patriotic War against Germany and conquered outer space.” That empire, the Soviet Union, crashed in 1991. Again, there was a ten-year-long black hole. “Yeltsin is the black hole of modern Russian history,” Prokhanov said. Under Putin, Russian statehood reëmerged. In his latest book, which Prokhanov gave me as a gift, he has a set piece addressed to Putin called “The Symphony of the Fifth Empire.”
Prokhanov is pleased to conclude that Russia is entering a prolonged war with the West—a cold war, possibly worse. “There is always danger of worse,” he said, “even worse than nuclear war—and that is soulless surrender.” Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he insisted, the West was, through its spies and diplomats, through its perfidious deals with weak Russian leaders, able to achieve its objective: the destruction of the state. The West, he said, “destroyed the Soviet Union without setting off a single bomb.”
Nothing has lifted the spirits of intellectuals like Prokhanov—and tens of millions of their countrymen—quite like Putin’s decision to flout international opinion and annex Crimea. Prokhanov pronounced himself “ecstatic” about it. One of his favorite writers for Zavtra, Igor Strelkov, is a former Russian intelligence agent who is leading the separatists in Donetsk, and is widely believed to be among those who bear responsibility for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. On the day of the catastrophe, Prokhanov posted a veritable ode to Strelkov on the Zavtra Web site, saying that the Russian fight in eastern Ukraine was a battle for “divine justice” and comparing Strelkov—“Russian warrior, knight, perfect hero”—to the most fabled generals in national history. To Prokhanov, this glorification of an armed agent is only natural, the war for Ukraine a matter of highest principle.
“This is a great country with only arbitrary borders,” Prokhanov said. “People grabbed up our territory, chopped it up into bits. Some people got used to this state of affairs and didn’t notice that their extremities had been chopped off—including the very pleasant extremity between your legs—and so it was with Ukraine. . . . Russians had to choose: ruin their relationship with the West, which was the very axe that chopped Russia into bits in the first place, or act without fear, because now Russia has an axe of its own.”
“When you see what is going on in Iraq, you can see that America is powerless to respond,” Prokhanov went on. “America brought chaos to the Middle East. Al Qaeda has its own state. And now Obama doesn’t want to send bombers to destroy it. We poor Russians have to go destroy it. Aren’t you ashamed?”
Prokhanov is hardly an outlier on today’s ideological scene in Russia. Nor is the geopolitical theorist, mystic, and high-minded crackpot Aleksandr Dugin, who has published in Prokhanov’s newspapers. He was once as marginal as a Lyndon LaRouche follower with a card table and a stack of leaflets. He used to appear mainly on SPAS (Salvation), an organ of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now the state affords him frequent guest spots on official television.
Dugin is in his mid-fifties and wears a beard worthy of Dostoyevsky. His father, he says, “probably” worked for military intelligence. His parents divorced when he was three. He hated Soviet society. He hated his family. “I hated the world I was born into,” he said. As a teen-ager, he fell into a circle of eccentric kitchen intellectuals, young people who despised Communism and the West with equal fervor. “They were kind of loonies,” Dugin told me. He attended the Moscow Aviation Institute, but was thrown out for his anti-Soviet, far-right politics.
Dugin’s intellectual journey includes dalliances at various times with pagans, priests, monarchists, fascists, neo-Bolsheviks, and imperialists. He admires far-right European theorists like the Weimar conservative Carl Schmitt; he admires various strains of the European New Right. He is a follower of René Guénon, a French mid-century philosopher who espoused the doctrine that became known as Traditionalism, which bemoans the decline of man since Creation and rejects modernity and rationalism. His most powerful influence is the Eurasianists, who envisioned Russia as a unique civilization, neither European nor Asian, with its own “special destiny” and grandeur.
The world, for Dugin, is divided between conservative land powers (Russia) and libertine maritime powers (the U.S. and the U.K.)—Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage. The maritime powers seek to impose their will, and their decadent materialism, on the rest of the world. This struggle is at the heart of history. For Dugin, Russia must rise from its prolonged post-Soviet depression and reassert itself, this time as the center of a Eurasian empire, against the dark forces of America. And this means war. Dugin rejects the racism of the Nazis, but embraces their sense of hierarchy, their romance of death. “We need a new party,” he has written. “A party of death. A party of the total vertical. God’s party, the Russian analogue to the Hezbollah, which would act according to wholly different rules and contemplate completely different pictures.”
For all of Dugin’s extremism, he has, in the past decade, found supporters in the Russian élite. According to the Israeli scholar Yigal Liverant and other sources, Dugin’s work is read in the Russian military academy. He has served as an adviser to Gennady Seleznyov, the former chairman of the Russian parliament. His Eurasia Movement, which was founded in 2001, included members of the government and the official media. He declared his “absolute” support for Putin, and when he pressed his political positions in public it was usually to take the most hard-line positions possible, particularly on Georgia and Ukraine. In 2008, he was appointed head of the Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University. Dugin used to brag that “Putin is becoming more and more like Dugin.” And indeed Putin speaks more and more in terms of Russian vastness, Russian exceptionalism, of Russia as a moral paradigm.
When I asked Dugin about his connection to, or influence over, Putin, though, Dugin carefully disavowed any “personal connection” to the President. “I doubt that he knows who I am,” he said. “My influence on politics is zero, on government zero. I am working only on my Platonic vision of things.” Yet the mystic chords of that vision have come to reverberate widely in Russian society.
Dugin began to visit the West in 1989. Even though he spent most of his time calling on like-minded leaders of the European New Right, such as Alain de Benoist, he loathed his time there. Paris and Berlin were, in 1989, “worse than the Soviet Union.” Commercialism had obliterated the European culture he loved and reduced its citizens to a state of profound “loneliness.” As for the Americans, he found them “honest and clear and pragmatic and very free, and they are not so corrupt or hypocritical or decadent as Europe—but they are absolutely wrong at the same time in the metaphysical sense. They have a cult of real evil there. What they have taken for the most important value—individuality—is absolutely wrong. . . . I think American society is simply insane.”
The day before I called on Dugin at his office, he had been mysteriously dismissed from his teaching post at the university. He had apparently gone too far. On the air, he had called on Russian forces to attack Ukraine with the full force of the Army—“Kill! Kill! Kill!”—and made it plain, on social media, that he was deeply disappointed in Putin’s decision to limit himself to the annexation of Crimea.
Dugin said that he conceived of Putin as a man divided within himself—“the solar Putin,” who is a Russian patriot and a fierce conservative, and “the lunar Putin,” who is “conformist” and pro-Western. Dugin is a sun worshipper. Only the invasion and annexation of Ukraine will satisfy him.
In the Moscow of Putin Redux, Michael McFaul could not hope to make many inroads. And with every week his and his family’s life in Moscow became more unnerving.
“They ran all kinds of operations against me,” McFaul told me when we met this winter at the Olympics, in Sochi. There were demonstrators outside Spaso and the American Embassy. Russians, presumably paid stooges, posted on social media that McFaul was everything from a spy to a pedophile. There were death threats. Russian intelligence agents occasionally followed McFaul in his car, and even showed up at his kids’ soccer games. The family felt under siege. “They wanted us to know they were there,” he said. “They went out of their way to make us feel their presence, to scare us.”
McFaul was pleased to see that some of his old friends—human-rights activists like Lev Ponomaryov—had remained steadfast friends and true to their principles, but many had sold themselves out for money or Kremlin favor. People he had first met in the pro-democracy movement more than twenty years ago were now feeding at the trough of authoritarian power and the various business conglomerates aligned with it: they were Kremlin officials and advisers, oil and gas magnates, highly obedient intellectuals. Sergei Markov, one of his closest friends from the old days, and a co-author with him of a book called “The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy,” was now a Putin loyalist.
Markov, who speaks decent English, frequently goes on foreign television to make the Kremlin’s case. He has accused Blackwater of assassinating innocent Ukrainians at Maidan. He has said that Russian doctors were devising a “special medicine” to “cure” gays and lesbians and move them toward “normal sexuality.” He is always on call to attack Obama.
I knew Markov, too, when McFaul did, and I had a hard time believing that he had become so reactionary, so shameless. I asked him about his outlandish remarks about gays on television. Was it true what he had said—that Russian doctors were working on a “special” gay-reversal medicine?
“I will speak frankly,” he said. “Russian medicine is not working on this. But I don’t want to talk about gays—but every time they ask about gays! I personally believe homosexuality is part of a human mind’s nature. And I believe homosexuality is behind every human being’s nature, one per cent, two per cent, and it can develop under some circumstances. And I am very sorry, but I will make a strong comparison—it’s like sadism. Sadism is in every human’s psychology. But it can develop only under some circumstances. If someone becomes gay, it is also, I believe, bad for him. . . . Someone can say, ‘I am proud that I am gay.’ O.K., I can believe. But if they say, ‘I am happy I am gay,’ I don’t trust that. It just isn’t true.”
Markov holds a variety of academic and governmental advisory posts, and when I paid him a visit at his office he allowed that he was “a little bit” conspiratorial in his thinking these days. He said that “the international oligarchy—Soros, the Rockefellers, the Morgans—all these big, rich families and networks” were backing an attempt to topple Putin. “They want to take control of Russian gas and oil resources.” That there is such a conspiracy afoot is also “clear to Putin.”
Putin himself has not been reluctant to express his sense of such hidden intrigues. When Secretary of State John Kerry came to town for the first time, he and McFaul went together to see Putin. At one point, Putin stared at McFaul across the table and said, “We know that your Embassy is working with the opposition to undermine me.”
“What do you mean?” Kerry said.
“We know this,” Putin said.
“Putin didn’t want to go into details,” McFaul continued. “He stared right at me. . . . That kind of threatening, we-will-prevail look.”
On February 4th, McFaul announced that he would step down as Ambassador following the Sochi Olympics. Angered by the anti-gay-propaganda laws, the Obama Administration had scaled back its delegation to the event. They sent no top officials and made sure that the most prominent figures were gay athletes. When I had breakfast with McFaul in Sochi, he made it clear that he was keeping a low profile and leaving after just a few days. His family was waiting for him in Palo Alto. For such an easygoing guy, McFaul can show surprising flashes of temper and irritation. In Sochi, he just seemed sombre. He had lasted two years in Moscow, hardly a truncated term, and he had poured his heart into the job, but his ambassadorship had not been a success. It couldn’t have been, not when, in McFaul’s words, the U.S.-Russia relationship was “at its lowest point since the post-Soviet period began, in 1991.”
In March, after Putin annexed Crimea, McFaul wrote what he saw as his “Kennan” manifesto for theTimes’ Op-Ed page. He endorsed the Administration’s policy—sanctions, isolation, expulsion from international organizations like the G-8—but he also admitted that the U.S. “does not have the same moral authority as it did in the last century.” He recalled that when he was Ambassador and challenged his Russian interlocutors on issues of international law and a commitment to sovereignty, he was met with “What about Iraq?” And, in a subtle jab at Obama, he wrote, “We are enduring a drift of disengagement in world affairs. After two wars, this was inevitable, but we cannot swing too far. As we pull back, Russia is pushing forward.”
A few months after our meeting in Sochi, I went to see McFaul in Palo Alto. We rode around town in his car. It smelled as if he had bought it last week. His offices—he has three of them, for various bureaucratic reasons—overflowed with books that now seem superfluous: endless volumes on the perestroika years, books about transitions to democratic governance. I glanced at the book McFaul had published with Sergei Markov and remarked on how much Markov had changed.
“When I met him, he was against the status quo, he was for change,” McFaul said. “He was for social democracy. But, remember, they hadn’t had decades to discuss ideas. They were against the regime—that was the main thing, being against. This happens in lots of transitions: a coalition against Them. And then what they are for gets worked out in the post-revolutionary phase. That’s natural and normal. What’s a little more depressing are those others who get bought out and co-opted for financial reasons.”
Although McFaul feels a deep sense of outrage about Putin, he also understood the mind-set of resentment and conspiracy. “I didn’t go to foment revolution,” he said. “I went to take the reset to the next stage. That was my mandate.” He added, “Obama people don’t sponsor color revolutions. Other Administrations had done this. Has the U.S. used covert operations to foment regime change? The answer is yes. I don’t want to get in trouble or go to jail, but has the U.S. supported the opposition to bring about political change? Serbia is a paradigmatic case: direct money to the opposition to destabilize things, and it was successful.” He also cited the overthrow of Mossadegh, in 1953, in Iran, and the support for the Nicaraguan Contras.
“Putin has a theory of American power that has some empirical basis,” McFaul went on. “He strongly believes this is a major component of U.S. foreign policy. He has said it to the President, to Secretary Kerry. He even believes we sparked the Arab Spring as a C.I.A. operation. He believes we use force against regimes we don’t like. . . . By the way, he damn well knows that the government of the Soviet Union used covert support. He worked for one of the instruments of that policy. He really does kind of superimpose the way his system works onto the way he thinks our system works. He grossly exaggerates the role of the C.I.A. in the making of our foreign policy. He just doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does get it and doesn’t portray it that way. I struggle with that: is he really super-clever and this is his psych op, or does he believe it? I think he does believe that we are out to get him.”
Last month, Obama named a new Ambassador to Moscow: John Tefft, a career diplomat who has been Ambassador to Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia. This is a geography that will not necessarily enamor Tefft to the Kremlin.
On July 4th, I went with some Russian friends to Spaso House for the annual Independence Day party. The place was filled with hundreds of guests, diplomats from the other embassies, Russian officials, members of the downtrodden opposition. McFaul loved throwing these parties. He loved the jazz and blues bands he got to play in the back yard, the talk over the buffet tables, the intrigue, the conversation, the promise of it all. I sent McFaul an e-mail saying I’d somehow never been to Spaso and found the scale of the place shocking.
“The scale is shocking indeed,” he wrote back from Palo Alto. “Big downgrade to our place here at Stanford. I saw photos and got emails from people at July 4th, which made me very nostalgic.”
On July 17th, a surface-to-air missile shot Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 out of the air over the Donetsk region of Ukraine, killing almost three hundred men, women, and children. Western and Ukrainian intelligence agencies agree that the evidence implicates pro-Russian separatist forces in the region, which are funded, directed, and supported by Vladimir Putin, in Moscow.
Prokhanov and Dugin were entirely in tune with the reigning propaganda. All blame lay with Obama and the “illegal regime” in Kiev. “America did this—with a hand from Ukraine,” Prokhanov told me. “How could it be otherwise? A catastrophe like this helps America, not Russia. It serves to demonize Novorossiya and the forces there. It demonizes them to look like Al Qaeda. It brings us back to the sort of moment when Ronald Reagan called us the ‘evil empire.’ It tightens the international noose on Russia and it brings powerful pressure to bear on Putin, pressure designed to break his will. And, by blaming this on us, it helps our liberal intelligentsia consolidate their forces, the way the Orange Revolution and the Bolotnaya demonstrations did. There is a history to such conspiracies. Or have you forgotten your General Colin Powell at the U.N. with his ‘evidence’ and his theories about Saddam Hussein?”
McFaul is trying to enjoy his return to paradisal Palo Alto. His wife, Donna, is happier now that the family is no longer followed by spies and hostile reporters. The boys are spending long summer days at leisure. But McFaul can’t fully escape the tragic course of things.
“Just when I thought relations between the U.S. and Russia couldn’t get any lower, this tragedy happened,” McFaul said. “Of course, Putin could use this tragedy/accident/terrorist attack to distance himself from the insurgents that he has been supporting. It gives him a face-saving out. He could say, ‘They went too far, enough is enough. Time now to get serious about deëscalation and negotiation.’ I assign this possible outcome a small probability. More likely is that he will not change his course, the U.S. will then increase sanctions, and the war will continue. Neither scenario, however, offers a way to reverse this negative trajectory in U.S.-Russia relations. I really don’t see a serious opening until after Putin retires, and I have no idea when that will be.”
“In the long run, I am still very optimistic about Russia and Russians,” he went on. “In my two years as Ambassador, I just met too many young, smart, talented people who want to be connected to the world, not isolated from it. They also want a say in the government. They are scared now, and therefore not demonstrating, but they have not changed their preferences about the future they want. Instead, they are just hiding these preferences, but there will be a day when they will express them again. Putin’s regime cannot hold these people down forever. I do worry about the new nationalism that Putin has unleashed, and understand that many young Russians also embrace these extremist ideas. I see it on Twitter every day. But, in the long run, I see the Westernizers winning out. I just don’t know how long is the long run.” ♦
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Even as some well-known anti-gay groups like Focus on the Family moderate their views, a hard core of smaller groups, most of them religiously motivated, have continued to pump out demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities. These groups’ influence reaches far beyond what their size would suggest, because the “facts” they disseminate about homosexuality are often amplified by certain politicians, other groups and even news organizations. Of the 18 groups profiled below, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) will be listing 13 next year as hate groups, reflecting further research into their views; those are each marked with an asterisk. Generally, the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling. Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.
*Abiding Truth Ministries
Springfield, Mass.
Abiding Truth Ministries serves mainly as a launching pad for an international anti-gay campaign. Its founder, Scott Lively, is also responsible for a book, widely cited by gay-bashers, accusing homosexuals of running the Nazi Party.
Lively first emerged as an anti-gay activist when he became communications director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which was backing that state’s notorious Measure 9 vote in 1992. The measure, which failed, would have added language to the state constitution listing homosexuality, along with pedophilia and masochism, as “abnormal behavior.” Lively later served as California director of the American Family Association, another particularly hard-line anti-gay group (see below).
Lively is best known for co-authoring, with Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The book makes a series of claims that virtually no serious historian agrees with: that Hitler was gay, that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic homosexuals,” and that gays were especially selected for the SS because of their innate brutality. The claims are entirely false; in fact, the Nazis murdered significant numbers of gays and made homosexuality a death penalty offense in 1942. In the foreword, Abrams adds that homosexuality is “primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it. … They have no idea of how to act in the best interests of their country… . Their intention is to serve none but themselves.”
Lively has taken his message abroad to Eastern Europe (see Watchmen on the Walls, below), Africa and Russia. In a 2007 open letter to the Russian people, he asserted that “homosexuality is a personality disorder that involves various, often dangerous sexual addictions and aggressive, anti-social impulses.” In 2009, he went to Uganda to speak at a major conference on the evils of homosexuality, saying, among other things: “The gay movement is an evil institution. The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” He also met with Ugandan lawmakers. A month after Lively left the country, a bill was introduced that called for the death penalty for certain homosexual acts and prison for those who fail to disclose gays’ identities.
In 2008, Lively started the Redemption Gate Mission Society, a church that seeks to “re-Christianize” the city of Springfield, Mass., where he lives.
*American Family Association
Methodist minister Donald E. Wildmon formed the National Federation for Decency in 1977, changing its name to the American Family Association (AFA) in 1988. Today, the group, which was taken over by Tim Wildmon after his father’s 2010 retirement, claims a remarkable 2 million online supporters and 180,000 subscribers to its AFA Journal. It also broadcasts over nearly 200 radio stations.
The AFA seeks to support “traditional moral values,” but in recent years it has seemed to specialize in “combating the homosexual agenda.” In 2009, it hired Bryan Fischer, the former executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance, as its director of analysis for government and policy. Taking a page from the anti-gay fabulist Scott Lively (see Abiding Truth Ministries, above), Fischer claimed in a blog post last May 27 that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” (Ironically, the elder Wildmon was widely denounced as an anti-Semite after suggesting that Jews control the media, which the AFA says “shows a genuine hostility towards Christians.”) Fischer has described Hitler as “an active homosexual” who sought out gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” He proposed criminalizing homosexual behavior in another 2010 blog post and has advocated forcing gays into “reparative” therapy. In a 2010 “action alert,” the AFA warned that if homosexuals are allowed to openly serve in the military, “your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals.”
Gays aren’t the AFA’s only enemies. In late 2009, Fischer suggested that all Muslims should be banned from joining the U.S. military. “Islam is a totalitarian political ideology,” Fischer added in August 2010. “It is as racist as the KKK. ... Allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different that granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center built in honor of some King Kleagle.” A little later, according to the Huffington Post, Fischer said that whatever the government does to "to make it unthinkable for America's youth to join a white supremacist group," it should also do "to make it as unthinkable for a resident of America to embrace Islam." Around the same time, the Huffington Post said, he blogged that Muslim values are "grossly incompatible with American values," and therefore no place in America should allow a mosque to be built.
And then there are the promiscuous. On his May 26, 2010, radio show, Fischer recounted the biblical story of Phineas, who used a spear to kill a man and a woman who were having sex. Citing the nation’s “rampant sexual immorality,” Fischer said, “God is obviously looking for more Phineases in our day.”
*Americans for Truth About Homosexuality
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) was formed as a part-time venture in 1996 by long-time gay-basher Peter LaBarbera, who reorganized it in 2006 as a much more serious and influential, if often vicious, operation.
A one-time reporter for the conservative Washington Times, LaBarbera has been an energetic campaigner against “the radical homosexual agenda” since at least 1993, when he launched The Lambda Report, which claimed to do first-hand reporting to expose its gay enemies. Over the years, he has been an official with Accuracy in Media, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council and the Illinois Family Institute (see below for the last three). He left the Illinois Family Institute, where he’d been executive director, in 2006.
AFTAH is notable for its posting of the utterly discredited work of Paul Cameron (of the Family Research Institute; see below), who has claimed that gays and lesbians live vastly shorter lives than heterosexuals. Among the Cameron propaganda published by AFTAH are 2007 claims that gays and lesbians in Norway and Denmark live 24 fewer years than heterosexuals. Reviewing that claim, Danish epidemiologist Morten Frisch found that it had no scientific basis. LaBarbera himself, in 2002, compared the alleged dangers of homosexuality to those of “smoking, alcohol and drug abuse.” Similarly, AFTAH’s website carries essays describing homosexuality as a “lethal behavior addiction,” a “dangerous” practice that is “neither normal nor benign.”
In 2007, LaBarbera claimed there was “a disproportionate incidence of pedophilia” among gay men — yet another false assertion. The same year, he posted an open letter to the Lithuanian people from long-time gay-basher Scott Lively (see Abiding Truth Ministries, above), who has made a series of false claims about gays running the German Nazi Party. In the piece posted to the AFTAH website, Lively said homosexuals are trying to take away free speech from all opponents of gays and to silence all religious opinions on the matter.
The AFTAH site repeats bogus claims like the idea that a proposed bill in California would “promote cross-dressing, sex-change operations, bisexuality and homosexuality” to kindergartners and other children. And it ran an essay that falsely asserted that hate crime laws would “restrict our speech."
*American Vision
Led since 1986 by Gary DeMar, American Vision is one of the primary exponents of the doctrine of “Christian Reconstruction” — the idea that the U.S. was founded as a “Christian nation” and that its democracy should be replaced with a theocratic government based on Old Testament law. As a practical matter, that means American Vision, which describes its goal as “restor[ing] America’s Biblical foundation,” backs the death penalty for practicing homosexuals.
DeMar has modified that dictum slightly in the past, saying that homosexuals wouldn’t all be executed under a “reconstructed” government, but that he did believe that the occasional execution of “sodomites” would serve society well because “the law that requires the death penalty for homosexual acts effectively drives the perversion of homosexuality underground, back into the closet.” More recently, while hosting American Vision’s “The Gary DeMar Show” in December 2009, Joel McDurmon, the group’s research director, agreed that the Bible does call for killing homosexuals. And, he said, “when most of a society is Christian, is biblical, then it [execution of gays] is perfectly normal; it should definitely be in place.”
In April 2009, DeMar said: “Homosexuals aren’t content with only having the bedroom. They have taken their perversion into the classrooms, teaching that such practices are normal. There is nothing normal about what homosexuals do.”
DeMar, who was closely allied with the late D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries (see below), is a central figure in Reconstruction theology, which was founded by R.J. Rushdoony (see Chalcedon Foundation, below). He is co-author of Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t with Gary North.
DeMar has also said that a “long-term goal” should be “the execution of abortionists and their parents.” Islam is another enemy, he said in August 2010: “The long-term goal of Islam is the abolition of our constitutional freedoms.”
*Chalcedon Foundation
Vallecito, Calif.
The Chalcedon Foundation, named after a 451 A.D. council that proclaimed the state’s subservience to God, was started in 1965 by Rousas John Rushdoony, who is known as “father of Christian Reconstruction” theology. Led by Rushdoony’s son, Mark, since the elder Rushdoony’s death in 2001, the foundation continues to push for the imposition of Old Testament law on America and the world.
Reconstruction, as described in R.J. Rushdoony’s foundational 1973 book The Institutes of Biblical Law, is opposed to modern notions of equality, democracy or tolerance — instead, it embraces the most draconian of religious views. Rushdoony supported the death penalty for homosexuals, among other “abominators.” He also opposed what he called “unequal yoking” — interracial marriage — and “enforced integration,” insisting that “[a]ll men are NOT created equal before God” (the Bible, he explained, “recognizes that some people are by nature slaves”). Rushdoony also denied the Holocaust, saying the murder of 6 million Jews was “false witness.”
Rushdoony’s Reconstruction is indeed radical, even including “incorrigible children” among those deserving death. And virtually all of his works remain for sale on the Chalcedon Foundation website.
Today, most fundamentalist leaders deny holding such views. But a Who’s Who of the religious right — including Tim and Beverly LaHaye (see Concerned Women for America, below), Donald Wildmon (American Family Association, above), and the late D. James Kennedy (Coral Ridge Ministries, below) — once served alongside the elder Rushdoony on the Coalition for Revival, a group formed in 1984 to “reclaim America.” Rushdoony reportedly was also a member of the secretive Council of National Policy, a group of archconservative leaders.
Christian Anti-Defamation Commission
Vista, Calif.
Originally incorporated in 1999 by retired Army Gen. William Hollis, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission (CADC) says its goal is to serve as a “first line of response to anti-Christian defamation, bigotry and discrimination.” It was largely inactive until 2007, when it brought in as its new leader the Rev. Gary Cass, who claims that Christian-bashing, “the last acceptable form of bigotry in America, is alive and well and growing more intense and hysterical by the day.”
The CADC is heavily focused on the alleged evils of homosexuality. It has called the idea of allowing gays to serve openly in the military “evil”; opposed hate crimes legislation (which many religious-right groups falsely assert would make it easy to send pastors to prison for condemning homosexuality); and raged against a judge’s overturning of California’s Proposition 8, which had invalidated same-sex marriages. With regard to that last, it said: “Homosexuals have turned away from humbly worshipping the true and living God and his transcendent moral order in order to make an idol out of their sexual perversion and chaos.”
The group also has protested a lawsuit seeking to end public use of the motto, “In God We Trust”; encouraged the IRS to investigate the anti-theocratic Americans United for Separation of Church and State; and opposed a proposed Islamic center in New York City, saying Muslims “are exploiting the liberty we afford them to honor a murderous ideology that denies religious liberty every where [sic] it can.”
Although it is somewhat benign by comparison, the CADC has an advisory board that includes some of the country’s most hard-line anti-gay activists: Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition (see below); Donald Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association (above); and O’Neal Dozier, a pastor who wrote in his 2008 book that “[h]omosexuality not only spreads disease and neutralizes God’s command,” but also “destroys families.” The board also includes Carmen Mercer, a former top official of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a now-defunct nativist group that once ran its own armed civilian border patrols.
Concerned Women for America
Washington, D.C.
San Diego, Calif., activist Beverly LaHaye, whose husband Tim would go on to become famous as co-author of the Left Behind novels depicting the end times, started Concerned Women for America (CWA) in 1979 to create an anti-feminist group that matched the power of the National Organization for Women. Today, CWA claims more than 500,000 members organized into state chapters, a radio program that reaches more than 1 million listeners, and a cadre of attorneys and researchers devoted to the group’s mission of promoting biblical values.
LaHaye has blamed gay people for a “radical leftist crusade” in America and, over the years, has occasionally equated homosexuality with pedophilia. In 2001, she hired prominent anti-gay propagandists Robert Knight (now with Coral Ridge Ministries; see below) and Peter LaBarbera (now with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, above) to launch CWA’s Culture and Family Institute. Matt Barber was CWA’s policy director for cultural issues in 2007 and 2008 before moving on to similar work with the Liberty Counsel (below).
While at CWA, on April 12, 2007, Barber suggested against all the evidence that there were only a “miniscule number” of anti-gay hate crimes and most of those “may very well be rooted in fraudulent reports.” In comments that have since disappeared from CWA’s website, Barber demanded a federal probe of “homosexual activists” for their alleged fabrications of hate crime reports.
CWA long relied on and displayed Knight’s articles and talking points, including claims that “homosexuality carries enormous physical and mental health risks” and “gay marriage entices children to experiment with homosexuality.” Most remarkably, Knight cited the utterly discredited work of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, below) to bolster claims that homosexuality is harmful.
Today, CWA continues to make arguments against homosexuality on the basis of dubious claims. President Wendy Wright said this August that gay activists were using same-sex marriage “to indoctrinate children in schools to reject their parents’ values and to harass, sue and punish people who disagree.” Last year, CWA accused the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a group that works to stop anti-gay bullying in schools, of using that mission as a cover to promote homosexuality in schools, adding that “teaching students from a young age that the homosexual lifestyle is perfectly natural … will [cause them to] develop into adults who are desensitized to the harmful, immoral reality of sexual deviance.”
Coral Ridge Ministries
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The late Rev. D. James Kennedy started turning fundamentalist Coral Ridge Presbyterian into a mega-church in the 1960s, adding Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM) as its action arm in 1974 and claiming some 10,000 members by the 1990s. During the fiscal year ending in June 2009, CRM raised almost $18 million and spent more than $6 million of that on television and radio outreach efforts.
Over the years, Kennedy emphasized anti-gay rhetoric, particularly in his TV ministry. He recommended as “essential” the virulent work of R.J. Rushdoony (see Chalcedon Foundation, above), who believed practicing gays should be executed. In an especially nasty 1989 edition of a CRM newsletter, Kennedy ran photographs of children along with the tagline, “Sex With Children? Homosexuals Say Yes!”
After Kennedy died in 2007, Coral Ridge Presbyterian seemed to change course, merging in 2009 with New City Presbyterian Church under its pastor, Tullian Tchividjian, a grandson of evangelist Billy Graham. Tchividjian began to move the church away from divisive social issues; some 500 members of Coral Ridge, including Kennedy’s daughter, left as a result. Today, Tchividjian says that the church, with 2,400 congregants, is entirely separate from CRM.
CRM, however, has continued its hard-line course. In 2009, it hired anti-gay activist Robert Knight as a senior writer and Washington, D.C., correspondent. Knight has used the work of discredited researcher Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, below). In one recent essay on the CRM website, he argued against allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military, saying that “Bible-believing Christians would quickly find themselves unwelcome in Barney Frank’s new pansexual, cross-dressing military.” (Hector Padron, CRM’s executive vice president, wrote last May that such a change would post a “grave threat to the military.”)
In 2002, before joining CRM, Knight wrote that gay marriage “entices children to experiment with homosexuality” and that accepting homosexuality leads to “a loss of stability in communities, with a rise in crime, sexually transmitted diseases and other social pathologies. Still another is a shortage of employable, stable people.”
*Dove World Outreach Center
Gainesville, Fla.
The Dove World Outreach Center was founded in 1986 by Don Northrup and described itself as a “total concept church” in which all would be served. But Northrup died in 1996, and his successor brought in long-time Northrup associate Terry Jones as Dove’s leader in 2001. Since then, Jones has spouted increasingly vicious attacks on gays and Muslims, culminating in a plan that drew worldwide condemnation this September to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day.”
Jones and his family had spent some 20 years in Cologne, Germany, running a church that was allied with Dove. When he was asked to take over the Gainesville church, he apparently divided his time between the two until 2008, when the Cologne church was closed amid criticism of Jones by its congregants.
Jones pushed himself into the headlines last March, when he surrounded Dove with signs aimed at Craig Lowe, a Gainesville city commissioner who was running for mayor, that said “No Homo Mayor.” After an electioneering complaint was filed with the IRS (nonprofit churches cannot intervene in political campaigns), Jones had the signs shortened to the more generic “No Homo.” At one point, Jones and 30 of his congregants joined an anti-gay rally by the Westboro Baptist Church, which runs the <a href="http://Godhatesfags.com" rel="nofollow">Godhatesfags.com</a> website and regularly pickets the funerals of U.S. soldiers, saying God is killing soldiers because America is a “fag-enabling” nation.
Jones is also the author of a book entitled Islam is of the Devil, and he has used that phrase on another set of signs posted around his church and sent his followers’ children to school in T-shirts bearing that slogan. (The school refused to let the children wear the shirts, and the ACLU filed suit against it as a result.) He regularly repeats the phrase on his “Braveheart Show,” an Internet video program where he asserted last April that “[h]omosexuality makes God throw up.”
Jones and his tiny congregation became momentarily famous this September, when he said he would burn Korans to protest Islam, which he describes as “an evil religion.” The threat drew public condemnation from Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and several leading members of the Obama Administration, and sparked anti-U.S. rallies in Muslim countries. In the end, Jones withdrew his threat and rapidly sank back into political obscurity.
*Faithful Word Baptist Church
Tempe, Ariz.
Steven Anderson, formerly affiliated with Sacramento, Calif.-based Regency Baptist Church, started Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona on Christmas Day 2005 as a “totally independent” organization. With “well over a hundred chapters of the Bible memorized word-for-word,” Anderson quickly led his congregation into a series of extremely radical stands.
Much of his venom was aimed at homosexuals, who he suggests should be killed (“The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers but not for homosexuals”). In an August 2009 sermon, he attacked the United Methodist Church, saying “10% of their preachers are queers” and adding, “they got a dyke and a faggot behind the pulpit.” He has described gays as “sodomites” who “recruit through rape” and “recruit through molestation.”
Anderson is also a virulent government hater. As operator of the True Sons of Liberty website, the pastor calls for abolishing the IRS, the Federal Reserve, Social Security and Child Protective Services state agencies. In April 2009, he refused to get out of his car or answer questions from Border Patrol agents at the California-Arizona border. Agents broke his window and tased him as a result.
Anderson brought his church national notoriety in August 2009, when a member of his congregation, Christopher Broughton, went to an Obama appearance in Phoenix legally carrying an assault rifle and a pistol. It turned out that Anderson had preached a day earlier to Broughton and others that he “hates Obama” and would “pray that he dies and goes to hell.” Two weeks later, he told openly gay columnist Michelangelo Signorile that he “would not judge or condemn” anyone who killed the president. Then, for good measure, he told Signorile at the end of the interview, “If you’re a homosexual, I hope you get brain cancer and die like Ted Kennedy.”
*Family Research Council
Washington, D.C.
Started as a small think tank in 1983, the Family Research Council (FRC) merged in 1988 with the much larger religious-right group Focus on the Family in 1988, and brought on Gary Bauer, former U.S. undersecretary of education under Ronald Reagan, as president. In 1992, the two groups legally separated to protect Focus on the Family’s tax-exempt status, although Focus founder James Dobson and two other Focus officials were placed on the FRC’s newly independent board. By that time, FRC had become a powerful group on its own.
Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight, who also worked at Concerned Women for America but now is at Coral Ridge Ministries (see above for both), along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”
That’s the least of it. In a 1999 publication (Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia) that has since disappeared from its website, the FRC claimed that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” according to unrefuted research by AMERICAblog. The same publication argued that “homosexual activists publicly disassociate themselves from pedophiles as part of a public relations strategy.” FRC offered no evidence for these remarkable assertions, and has never publicly retracted the allegations. (The American Psychological Association, among others, has concluded that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”)
In fact, in a Nov. 30, 2010, debate on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” between Perkins and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok, Perkins defended FRC’s association of gay men with pedophilia, saying: “If you look at the American College of Pediatricians, they say the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children. So Mark is wrong. He needs to go back and do his own research.” In fact, the college, despite its hifalutin name, is a tiny, explicitly religious-right breakaway group from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the 60,000-member association of the profession. Publications of the American College of Pediatricians, which has some 200 members, have been roundly attacked by leading scientific authorities who say they are baseless and accuse the college of distorting and misrepresenting their work.
Elsewhere, according to AMERICAblog, Knight, while working at the FRC, claimed that “[t]here is a strong current of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture. … [T]hey want to promote a promiscuous society.” AMERICAblog also reported that then-FRC official Yvette Cantu, in an interview published on Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s website, said, “If they [gays and lesbians] had children, what would happen when they were too busy having their sex parties?”
More recently, in March 2008, Sprigg, responding to a question about uniting gay partners during the immigration process, said: “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them.” He later apologized, but then went on, last February, to tell MSNBC host Chris Matthews, “I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior.” “So we should outlaw gay behavior?” Matthews asked. “Yes,” Sprigg replied. At around the same time, Sprigg claimed that allowing gay people to serve openly in the military would lead to an increase in gay-on-straight sexual assaults.
Perkins has his own unusual history. In 1996, while managing the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican State Rep. Louis “Woody” Jenkins of Louisiana, Perkins paid $82,500 to use the mailing list of former Klan chieftain David Duke. The campaign was fined $3,000 (reduced from $82,500) after Perkins and Jenkins filed false disclosure forms in a bid to hide the link to Duke. Five years later, on May 17, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins claimed not to know the group’s ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation. In 1999, after Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was embroiled in a national scandal over his ties to the group, GOP chairman Jim Nicholson urged Republicans to quit the CCC because of its “racist views.” That statement and the nationally publicized Lott controversy came two years before Perkins’ 2001 speech.
*Family Research Institute
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Started in 1987 by psychologist Paul Cameron, the Family Research Institute (FRI) has become the anti-gay movement’s main source for what Cameron claims is “cutting-edge research” — but is, in fact, completely discredited junk science pushed out by a man who has been condemned by three professional organizations.
Over nearly three decades, Cameron has published “research studies” (though almost never in peer-reviewed journals) that suggest that homosexuals are predatory and diseased perverts who victimize children. Among his more recent defamations was an FRI pamphlet asserting the primary activity of the gay rights movement is “seeking to legitimize child-adult homosexual sex.” In another, he claimed that with “the rise of the gay rights movement, homosexual rape of men appears to have increased.” In yet another, he wrote, “Homosexuals were three times more likely to admit to having made an obscene phone call” and “a third more apt to report a traffic ticket or traffic accident in the past 5 years.”
Some of Cameron’s more infamous claims include the idea that homosexuals molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals and that homosexuals have extremely short lives. Last February, he wrote on FRI’s website that “[i]f homosexuals are allowed to serve in the military, they will be recruiting in showers, having sex in the barracks… . Before long, the U.S. may be defended by the sex-obsessed and those who can tolerate kowtowing to them.” After all, writes Cameron — a man who proposes that parents promote teen heterosexual activity to keep kids straight — “homosexual sex overwhelms rationality [and] overwhelms the desire to serve.”
Cameron’s colleagues have condemned him repeatedly. In 1983, he was thrown out of the American Psychological Association for ethical violations. In 1984, the Nebraska Psychological Association disassociated itself from Cameron’s statements about sexuality. In 1985, the American Sociological Association adopted a resolution saying Cameron “has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality” and “repeatedly campaigned for the abrogation of the civil rights of lesbians and gay men”; the following year, the same group formally condemned Cameron for that misrepresentation of research.
*Abiding Truth Ministries
Springfield, Mass.
Abiding Truth Ministries serves mainly as a launching pad for an international anti-gay campaign. Its founder, Scott Lively, is also responsible for a book, widely cited by gay-bashers, accusing homosexuals of running the Nazi Party.
Lively first emerged as an anti-gay activist when he became communications director for the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which was backing that state’s notorious Measure 9 vote in 1992. The measure, which failed, would have added language to the state constitution listing homosexuality, along with pedophilia and masochism, as “abnormal behavior.” Lively later served as California director of the American Family Association, another particularly hard-line anti-gay group (see below).
Lively is best known for co-authoring, with Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The book makes a series of claims that virtually no serious historian agrees with: that Hitler was gay, that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic homosexuals,” and that gays were especially selected for the SS because of their innate brutality. The claims are entirely false; in fact, the Nazis murdered significant numbers of gays and made homosexuality a death penalty offense in 1942. In the foreword, Abrams adds that homosexuality is “primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it. … They have no idea of how to act in the best interests of their country… . Their intention is to serve none but themselves.”
Lively has taken his message abroad to Eastern Europe (see Watchmen on the Walls, below), Africa and Russia. In a 2007 open letter to the Russian people, he asserted that “homosexuality is a personality disorder that involves various, often dangerous sexual addictions and aggressive, anti-social impulses.” In 2009, he went to Uganda to speak at a major conference on the evils of homosexuality, saying, among other things: “The gay movement is an evil institution. The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.” He also met with Ugandan lawmakers. A month after Lively left the country, a bill was introduced that called for the death penalty for certain homosexual acts and prison for those who fail to disclose gays’ identities.
In 2008, Lively started the Redemption Gate Mission Society, a church that seeks to “re-Christianize” the city of Springfield, Mass., where he lives.
*American Family Association
Methodist minister Donald E. Wildmon formed the National Federation for Decency in 1977, changing its name to the American Family Association (AFA) in 1988. Today, the group, which was taken over by Tim Wildmon after his father’s 2010 retirement, claims a remarkable 2 million online supporters and 180,000 subscribers to its AFA Journal. It also broadcasts over nearly 200 radio stations.
The AFA seeks to support “traditional moral values,” but in recent years it has seemed to specialize in “combating the homosexual agenda.” In 2009, it hired Bryan Fischer, the former executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance, as its director of analysis for government and policy. Taking a page from the anti-gay fabulist Scott Lively (see Abiding Truth Ministries, above), Fischer claimed in a blog post last May 27 that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” (Ironically, the elder Wildmon was widely denounced as an anti-Semite after suggesting that Jews control the media, which the AFA says “shows a genuine hostility towards Christians.”) Fischer has described Hitler as “an active homosexual” who sought out gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” He proposed criminalizing homosexual behavior in another 2010 blog post and has advocated forcing gays into “reparative” therapy. In a 2010 “action alert,” the AFA warned that if homosexuals are allowed to openly serve in the military, “your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals.”
Gays aren’t the AFA’s only enemies. In late 2009, Fischer suggested that all Muslims should be banned from joining the U.S. military. “Islam is a totalitarian political ideology,” Fischer added in August 2010. “It is as racist as the KKK. ... Allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different that granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center built in honor of some King Kleagle.” A little later, according to the Huffington Post, Fischer said that whatever the government does to "to make it unthinkable for America's youth to join a white supremacist group," it should also do "to make it as unthinkable for a resident of America to embrace Islam." Around the same time, the Huffington Post said, he blogged that Muslim values are "grossly incompatible with American values," and therefore no place in America should allow a mosque to be built.
And then there are the promiscuous. On his May 26, 2010, radio show, Fischer recounted the biblical story of Phineas, who used a spear to kill a man and a woman who were having sex. Citing the nation’s “rampant sexual immorality,” Fischer said, “God is obviously looking for more Phineases in our day.”
*Americans for Truth About Homosexuality
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) was formed as a part-time venture in 1996 by long-time gay-basher Peter LaBarbera, who reorganized it in 2006 as a much more serious and influential, if often vicious, operation.
A one-time reporter for the conservative Washington Times, LaBarbera has been an energetic campaigner against “the radical homosexual agenda” since at least 1993, when he launched The Lambda Report, which claimed to do first-hand reporting to expose its gay enemies. Over the years, he has been an official with Accuracy in Media, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council and the Illinois Family Institute (see below for the last three). He left the Illinois Family Institute, where he’d been executive director, in 2006.
AFTAH is notable for its posting of the utterly discredited work of Paul Cameron (of the Family Research Institute; see below), who has claimed that gays and lesbians live vastly shorter lives than heterosexuals. Among the Cameron propaganda published by AFTAH are 2007 claims that gays and lesbians in Norway and Denmark live 24 fewer years than heterosexuals. Reviewing that claim, Danish epidemiologist Morten Frisch found that it had no scientific basis. LaBarbera himself, in 2002, compared the alleged dangers of homosexuality to those of “smoking, alcohol and drug abuse.” Similarly, AFTAH’s website carries essays describing homosexuality as a “lethal behavior addiction,” a “dangerous” practice that is “neither normal nor benign.”
In 2007, LaBarbera claimed there was “a disproportionate incidence of pedophilia” among gay men — yet another false assertion. The same year, he posted an open letter to the Lithuanian people from long-time gay-basher Scott Lively (see Abiding Truth Ministries, above), who has made a series of false claims about gays running the German Nazi Party. In the piece posted to the AFTAH website, Lively said homosexuals are trying to take away free speech from all opponents of gays and to silence all religious opinions on the matter.
The AFTAH site repeats bogus claims like the idea that a proposed bill in California would “promote cross-dressing, sex-change operations, bisexuality and homosexuality” to kindergartners and other children. And it ran an essay that falsely asserted that hate crime laws would “restrict our speech."
*American Vision
Led since 1986 by Gary DeMar, American Vision is one of the primary exponents of the doctrine of “Christian Reconstruction” — the idea that the U.S. was founded as a “Christian nation” and that its democracy should be replaced with a theocratic government based on Old Testament law. As a practical matter, that means American Vision, which describes its goal as “restor[ing] America’s Biblical foundation,” backs the death penalty for practicing homosexuals.
DeMar has modified that dictum slightly in the past, saying that homosexuals wouldn’t all be executed under a “reconstructed” government, but that he did believe that the occasional execution of “sodomites” would serve society well because “the law that requires the death penalty for homosexual acts effectively drives the perversion of homosexuality underground, back into the closet.” More recently, while hosting American Vision’s “The Gary DeMar Show” in December 2009, Joel McDurmon, the group’s research director, agreed that the Bible does call for killing homosexuals. And, he said, “when most of a society is Christian, is biblical, then it [execution of gays] is perfectly normal; it should definitely be in place.”
In April 2009, DeMar said: “Homosexuals aren’t content with only having the bedroom. They have taken their perversion into the classrooms, teaching that such practices are normal. There is nothing normal about what homosexuals do.”
DeMar, who was closely allied with the late D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries (see below), is a central figure in Reconstruction theology, which was founded by R.J. Rushdoony (see Chalcedon Foundation, below). He is co-author of Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t with Gary North.
DeMar has also said that a “long-term goal” should be “the execution of abortionists and their parents.” Islam is another enemy, he said in August 2010: “The long-term goal of Islam is the abolition of our constitutional freedoms.”
*Chalcedon Foundation
Vallecito, Calif.
The Chalcedon Foundation, named after a 451 A.D. council that proclaimed the state’s subservience to God, was started in 1965 by Rousas John Rushdoony, who is known as “father of Christian Reconstruction” theology. Led by Rushdoony’s son, Mark, since the elder Rushdoony’s death in 2001, the foundation continues to push for the imposition of Old Testament law on America and the world.
Reconstruction, as described in R.J. Rushdoony’s foundational 1973 book The Institutes of Biblical Law, is opposed to modern notions of equality, democracy or tolerance — instead, it embraces the most draconian of religious views. Rushdoony supported the death penalty for homosexuals, among other “abominators.” He also opposed what he called “unequal yoking” — interracial marriage — and “enforced integration,” insisting that “[a]ll men are NOT created equal before God” (the Bible, he explained, “recognizes that some people are by nature slaves”). Rushdoony also denied the Holocaust, saying the murder of 6 million Jews was “false witness.”
Rushdoony’s Reconstruction is indeed radical, even including “incorrigible children” among those deserving death. And virtually all of his works remain for sale on the Chalcedon Foundation website.
Today, most fundamentalist leaders deny holding such views. But a Who’s Who of the religious right — including Tim and Beverly LaHaye (see Concerned Women for America, below), Donald Wildmon (American Family Association, above), and the late D. James Kennedy (Coral Ridge Ministries, below) — once served alongside the elder Rushdoony on the Coalition for Revival, a group formed in 1984 to “reclaim America.” Rushdoony reportedly was also a member of the secretive Council of National Policy, a group of archconservative leaders.
Christian Anti-Defamation Commission
Vista, Calif.
Originally incorporated in 1999 by retired Army Gen. William Hollis, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission (CADC) says its goal is to serve as a “first line of response to anti-Christian defamation, bigotry and discrimination.” It was largely inactive until 2007, when it brought in as its new leader the Rev. Gary Cass, who claims that Christian-bashing, “the last acceptable form of bigotry in America, is alive and well and growing more intense and hysterical by the day.”
The CADC is heavily focused on the alleged evils of homosexuality. It has called the idea of allowing gays to serve openly in the military “evil”; opposed hate crimes legislation (which many religious-right groups falsely assert would make it easy to send pastors to prison for condemning homosexuality); and raged against a judge’s overturning of California’s Proposition 8, which had invalidated same-sex marriages. With regard to that last, it said: “Homosexuals have turned away from humbly worshipping the true and living God and his transcendent moral order in order to make an idol out of their sexual perversion and chaos.”
The group also has protested a lawsuit seeking to end public use of the motto, “In God We Trust”; encouraged the IRS to investigate the anti-theocratic Americans United for Separation of Church and State; and opposed a proposed Islamic center in New York City, saying Muslims “are exploiting the liberty we afford them to honor a murderous ideology that denies religious liberty every where [sic] it can.”
Although it is somewhat benign by comparison, the CADC has an advisory board that includes some of the country’s most hard-line anti-gay activists: Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition (see below); Donald Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association (above); and O’Neal Dozier, a pastor who wrote in his 2008 book that “[h]omosexuality not only spreads disease and neutralizes God’s command,” but also “destroys families.” The board also includes Carmen Mercer, a former top official of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a now-defunct nativist group that once ran its own armed civilian border patrols.
Concerned Women for America
Washington, D.C.
San Diego, Calif., activist Beverly LaHaye, whose husband Tim would go on to become famous as co-author of the Left Behind novels depicting the end times, started Concerned Women for America (CWA) in 1979 to create an anti-feminist group that matched the power of the National Organization for Women. Today, CWA claims more than 500,000 members organized into state chapters, a radio program that reaches more than 1 million listeners, and a cadre of attorneys and researchers devoted to the group’s mission of promoting biblical values.
LaHaye has blamed gay people for a “radical leftist crusade” in America and, over the years, has occasionally equated homosexuality with pedophilia. In 2001, she hired prominent anti-gay propagandists Robert Knight (now with Coral Ridge Ministries; see below) and Peter LaBarbera (now with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, above) to launch CWA’s Culture and Family Institute. Matt Barber was CWA’s policy director for cultural issues in 2007 and 2008 before moving on to similar work with the Liberty Counsel (below).
While at CWA, on April 12, 2007, Barber suggested against all the evidence that there were only a “miniscule number” of anti-gay hate crimes and most of those “may very well be rooted in fraudulent reports.” In comments that have since disappeared from CWA’s website, Barber demanded a federal probe of “homosexual activists” for their alleged fabrications of hate crime reports.
CWA long relied on and displayed Knight’s articles and talking points, including claims that “homosexuality carries enormous physical and mental health risks” and “gay marriage entices children to experiment with homosexuality.” Most remarkably, Knight cited the utterly discredited work of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, below) to bolster claims that homosexuality is harmful.
Today, CWA continues to make arguments against homosexuality on the basis of dubious claims. President Wendy Wright said this August that gay activists were using same-sex marriage “to indoctrinate children in schools to reject their parents’ values and to harass, sue and punish people who disagree.” Last year, CWA accused the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a group that works to stop anti-gay bullying in schools, of using that mission as a cover to promote homosexuality in schools, adding that “teaching students from a young age that the homosexual lifestyle is perfectly natural … will [cause them to] develop into adults who are desensitized to the harmful, immoral reality of sexual deviance.”
Coral Ridge Ministries
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The late Rev. D. James Kennedy started turning fundamentalist Coral Ridge Presbyterian into a mega-church in the 1960s, adding Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM) as its action arm in 1974 and claiming some 10,000 members by the 1990s. During the fiscal year ending in June 2009, CRM raised almost $18 million and spent more than $6 million of that on television and radio outreach efforts.
Over the years, Kennedy emphasized anti-gay rhetoric, particularly in his TV ministry. He recommended as “essential” the virulent work of R.J. Rushdoony (see Chalcedon Foundation, above), who believed practicing gays should be executed. In an especially nasty 1989 edition of a CRM newsletter, Kennedy ran photographs of children along with the tagline, “Sex With Children? Homosexuals Say Yes!”
After Kennedy died in 2007, Coral Ridge Presbyterian seemed to change course, merging in 2009 with New City Presbyterian Church under its pastor, Tullian Tchividjian, a grandson of evangelist Billy Graham. Tchividjian began to move the church away from divisive social issues; some 500 members of Coral Ridge, including Kennedy’s daughter, left as a result. Today, Tchividjian says that the church, with 2,400 congregants, is entirely separate from CRM.
CRM, however, has continued its hard-line course. In 2009, it hired anti-gay activist Robert Knight as a senior writer and Washington, D.C., correspondent. Knight has used the work of discredited researcher Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, below). In one recent essay on the CRM website, he argued against allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military, saying that “Bible-believing Christians would quickly find themselves unwelcome in Barney Frank’s new pansexual, cross-dressing military.” (Hector Padron, CRM’s executive vice president, wrote last May that such a change would post a “grave threat to the military.”)
In 2002, before joining CRM, Knight wrote that gay marriage “entices children to experiment with homosexuality” and that accepting homosexuality leads to “a loss of stability in communities, with a rise in crime, sexually transmitted diseases and other social pathologies. Still another is a shortage of employable, stable people.”
*Dove World Outreach Center
Gainesville, Fla.
The Dove World Outreach Center was founded in 1986 by Don Northrup and described itself as a “total concept church” in which all would be served. But Northrup died in 1996, and his successor brought in long-time Northrup associate Terry Jones as Dove’s leader in 2001. Since then, Jones has spouted increasingly vicious attacks on gays and Muslims, culminating in a plan that drew worldwide condemnation this September to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day.”
Jones and his family had spent some 20 years in Cologne, Germany, running a church that was allied with Dove. When he was asked to take over the Gainesville church, he apparently divided his time between the two until 2008, when the Cologne church was closed amid criticism of Jones by its congregants.
Jones pushed himself into the headlines last March, when he surrounded Dove with signs aimed at Craig Lowe, a Gainesville city commissioner who was running for mayor, that said “No Homo Mayor.” After an electioneering complaint was filed with the IRS (nonprofit churches cannot intervene in political campaigns), Jones had the signs shortened to the more generic “No Homo.” At one point, Jones and 30 of his congregants joined an anti-gay rally by the Westboro Baptist Church, which runs the <a href="http://Godhatesfags.com" rel="nofollow">Godhatesfags.com</a> website and regularly pickets the funerals of U.S. soldiers, saying God is killing soldiers because America is a “fag-enabling” nation.
Jones is also the author of a book entitled Islam is of the Devil, and he has used that phrase on another set of signs posted around his church and sent his followers’ children to school in T-shirts bearing that slogan. (The school refused to let the children wear the shirts, and the ACLU filed suit against it as a result.) He regularly repeats the phrase on his “Braveheart Show,” an Internet video program where he asserted last April that “[h]omosexuality makes God throw up.”
Jones and his tiny congregation became momentarily famous this September, when he said he would burn Korans to protest Islam, which he describes as “an evil religion.” The threat drew public condemnation from Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and several leading members of the Obama Administration, and sparked anti-U.S. rallies in Muslim countries. In the end, Jones withdrew his threat and rapidly sank back into political obscurity.
*Faithful Word Baptist Church
Tempe, Ariz.
Steven Anderson, formerly affiliated with Sacramento, Calif.-based Regency Baptist Church, started Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona on Christmas Day 2005 as a “totally independent” organization. With “well over a hundred chapters of the Bible memorized word-for-word,” Anderson quickly led his congregation into a series of extremely radical stands.
Much of his venom was aimed at homosexuals, who he suggests should be killed (“The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers but not for homosexuals”). In an August 2009 sermon, he attacked the United Methodist Church, saying “10% of their preachers are queers” and adding, “they got a dyke and a faggot behind the pulpit.” He has described gays as “sodomites” who “recruit through rape” and “recruit through molestation.”
Anderson is also a virulent government hater. As operator of the True Sons of Liberty website, the pastor calls for abolishing the IRS, the Federal Reserve, Social Security and Child Protective Services state agencies. In April 2009, he refused to get out of his car or answer questions from Border Patrol agents at the California-Arizona border. Agents broke his window and tased him as a result.
Anderson brought his church national notoriety in August 2009, when a member of his congregation, Christopher Broughton, went to an Obama appearance in Phoenix legally carrying an assault rifle and a pistol. It turned out that Anderson had preached a day earlier to Broughton and others that he “hates Obama” and would “pray that he dies and goes to hell.” Two weeks later, he told openly gay columnist Michelangelo Signorile that he “would not judge or condemn” anyone who killed the president. Then, for good measure, he told Signorile at the end of the interview, “If you’re a homosexual, I hope you get brain cancer and die like Ted Kennedy.”
*Family Research Council
Washington, D.C.
Started as a small think tank in 1983, the Family Research Council (FRC) merged in 1988 with the much larger religious-right group Focus on the Family in 1988, and brought on Gary Bauer, former U.S. undersecretary of education under Ronald Reagan, as president. In 1992, the two groups legally separated to protect Focus on the Family’s tax-exempt status, although Focus founder James Dobson and two other Focus officials were placed on the FRC’s newly independent board. By that time, FRC had become a powerful group on its own.
Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight, who also worked at Concerned Women for America but now is at Coral Ridge Ministries (see above for both), along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”
That’s the least of it. In a 1999 publication (Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia) that has since disappeared from its website, the FRC claimed that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” according to unrefuted research by AMERICAblog. The same publication argued that “homosexual activists publicly disassociate themselves from pedophiles as part of a public relations strategy.” FRC offered no evidence for these remarkable assertions, and has never publicly retracted the allegations. (The American Psychological Association, among others, has concluded that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”)
In fact, in a Nov. 30, 2010, debate on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” between Perkins and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok, Perkins defended FRC’s association of gay men with pedophilia, saying: “If you look at the American College of Pediatricians, they say the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children. So Mark is wrong. He needs to go back and do his own research.” In fact, the college, despite its hifalutin name, is a tiny, explicitly religious-right breakaway group from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the 60,000-member association of the profession. Publications of the American College of Pediatricians, which has some 200 members, have been roundly attacked by leading scientific authorities who say they are baseless and accuse the college of distorting and misrepresenting their work.
Elsewhere, according to AMERICAblog, Knight, while working at the FRC, claimed that “[t]here is a strong current of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture. … [T]hey want to promote a promiscuous society.” AMERICAblog also reported that then-FRC official Yvette Cantu, in an interview published on Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s website, said, “If they [gays and lesbians] had children, what would happen when they were too busy having their sex parties?”
More recently, in March 2008, Sprigg, responding to a question about uniting gay partners during the immigration process, said: “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them.” He later apologized, but then went on, last February, to tell MSNBC host Chris Matthews, “I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior.” “So we should outlaw gay behavior?” Matthews asked. “Yes,” Sprigg replied. At around the same time, Sprigg claimed that allowing gay people to serve openly in the military would lead to an increase in gay-on-straight sexual assaults.
Perkins has his own unusual history. In 1996, while managing the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican State Rep. Louis “Woody” Jenkins of Louisiana, Perkins paid $82,500 to use the mailing list of former Klan chieftain David Duke. The campaign was fined $3,000 (reduced from $82,500) after Perkins and Jenkins filed false disclosure forms in a bid to hide the link to Duke. Five years later, on May 17, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins claimed not to know the group’s ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation. In 1999, after Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was embroiled in a national scandal over his ties to the group, GOP chairman Jim Nicholson urged Republicans to quit the CCC because of its “racist views.” That statement and the nationally publicized Lott controversy came two years before Perkins’ 2001 speech.
*Family Research Institute
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Started in 1987 by psychologist Paul Cameron, the Family Research Institute (FRI) has become the anti-gay movement’s main source for what Cameron claims is “cutting-edge research” — but is, in fact, completely discredited junk science pushed out by a man who has been condemned by three professional organizations.
Over nearly three decades, Cameron has published “research studies” (though almost never in peer-reviewed journals) that suggest that homosexuals are predatory and diseased perverts who victimize children. Among his more recent defamations was an FRI pamphlet asserting the primary activity of the gay rights movement is “seeking to legitimize child-adult homosexual sex.” In another, he claimed that with “the rise of the gay rights movement, homosexual rape of men appears to have increased.” In yet another, he wrote, “Homosexuals were three times more likely to admit to having made an obscene phone call” and “a third more apt to report a traffic ticket or traffic accident in the past 5 years.”
Some of Cameron’s more infamous claims include the idea that homosexuals molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals and that homosexuals have extremely short lives. Last February, he wrote on FRI’s website that “[i]f homosexuals are allowed to serve in the military, they will be recruiting in showers, having sex in the barracks… . Before long, the U.S. may be defended by the sex-obsessed and those who can tolerate kowtowing to them.” After all, writes Cameron — a man who proposes that parents promote teen heterosexual activity to keep kids straight — “homosexual sex overwhelms rationality [and] overwhelms the desire to serve.”
Cameron’s colleagues have condemned him repeatedly. In 1983, he was thrown out of the American Psychological Association for ethical violations. In 1984, the Nebraska Psychological Association disassociated itself from Cameron’s statements about sexuality. In 1985, the American Sociological Association adopted a resolution saying Cameron “has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality” and “repeatedly campaigned for the abrogation of the civil rights of lesbians and gay men”; the following year, the same group formally condemned Cameron for that misrepresentation of research.
In late 2010, reacting to reports that his group had once again been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, Cameron told The (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Gazette that he believed homosexuality should be criminalized in America and that he was fine with a proposed bill in Ugandathat would punish some gay sexual acts with death (“Whatever they decide, I’m OK with”). He also proposed heavily taxing gays and single adults because of their failure to produce children. And he suggested that gays and lesbians undergo a “public shaming” of some kind.
Despite all this — and the fact that Cameron’s propaganda is widely known to be false or misleading — many groups have continued to use his claims, though often without citing their source. They include the American Family Association, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, the Family Research Council (see above for all five) and, until recently, the Illinois Family Institute (see below).
*Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment
Downers Grove, Ill.
Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (HOME) was founded by 62-year-old Wayne Lela, a former Catholic who now describes himself as an agnostic. Until recently, the 20-year-old group has had a fairly low profile.
The group, which is entirely focused on the alleged evils of homosexuality, attacks gay people on a wide variety of levels. But it keeps coming back to the idea that gay sexual activity should be illegal. “[P]enalizing people for engaging in homosexual behavior is clearly not discrimination, just like penalizing people for exhibitionism or incest is not discrimination,” HOME’s website says. In a second website comment, it adds, “[H]eterosexual activity is not illegalizeable … while homosexual activity is definitely illegalizeable.” And in a third, it insists that “legalizing homosexual deviations” leads to a “confused and sick society.”
HOME doesn’t stop there. It says that gays should apologize “for all the STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] they’ve spread, and all the money those STDs have cost, and especially for setting bad moral examples for our children.” It accuses homosexuals of having a “pathological attitude” toward the opposite sex. It says homosexuality shouldn’t have been removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. It says gays threaten free speech because they seek hate crime law protections. It argues that gay film directors are working to “condition men to bond with other men at the expense of women.” And it claims that pedophilia and necrophilia are a sexual orientations like homosexuality, going on to suggest that they could therefore be legalized.
And then there’s this: Freemasonry may be connected to “the homosexual movement,” with members evidently engaging in sodomy and “homosexual orgies.” Thus, HOME says, there is a “very real possibility that this group is using its influence to try to impose pro-homosexual ‘values’ on the public.”
*Illinois Family Institute
Carol Stream, Ill.
The Illinois Family Institute (IFI), which says it dedicates itself to issues surrounding “marriage, family, life and liberty,” is heavily focused on attacking gay people and homosexuality in general. It maintains “working partnerships” with other hard-line groups including the Family Research Council (see above) and the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal center based in Phoenix. In early 2010, it launched Illinois Family Action as a political-action sister organization.
In 2006, then-Executive Director Peter LaBarbera (see Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, above), told a religious-right gathering hosted by Vision America that homosexuality was "disgusting" and demanded the closing down of all "homosexual establishments." He called for the repeal of all "sexual orientation laws" — laws that ban discrimination against gays — and spoke of the "need to find ways to bring back shame to those practicing homosexual behavior."
Over the years, the group also has occasionally embraced the groundless propaganda of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, above). Until 2009, it carried an article on Cameron — “New Study Shows that Homosexuals Live 20 Fewer Years” — preceded by a full-throated endorsement LaBarbera. “Paul Cameron’s work has been targeted for ridicule by homosexual activists, and he’s been demonized by the left,” LaBarbera wrote in his introduction, “but that should not discount his findings.” IFI also posted a video attacking school anti-bullying programs that claimed, based on Cameron, that gay men’s median age of death is 42. Both were removed in response to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2009 listing of IFI as a hate group, which was largely based on its use of Cameron.
That response, however, hardly indicated that the IFI was backing down on its hard-line position. This year, Focus on the Family — for years, the powerhouse of anti-gay religious organizations in America — moderated its position markedly after founder James Dobson retired and pastor Jim Daly took over. In April, Daly told an interviewer: “I will continue to defend traditional marriage, but I’m not going to demean human beings in the process. It’s not about being highly confrontational.” The response of Laurie Higgins, IFI’s belligerent director of school advocacy, was that Daly was showing “surprising naïveté,” using the same language as pro-gay “homosexualists,” and failing to confront “the pro-homosexual juggernaut.”
In 2009, Higgins compared homosexuality to Nazism, likening the German Evangelical Church’s weak response to fascism to the “American church’s failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality.” Elsewhere, Higgins has pined for the days when gays were in the closet. “There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice… . [W]hen homosexuals were ‘in the closet,’ (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and ‘transexuals’), they weren’t acquiring and raising children.” She’s also said that McDonald’s, because it ran a gay-friendly TV ad, is “hell bent on using its resources to promote subversive moral, social, and political views about homosexuality to our children.”
Liberty Counsel
Orlando, Fla.
Created in 1989, Liberty Counsel is affiliated with Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., a legacy of the late conservative icon Jerry Falwell. It was founded and is still chaired by Mathew (Mat) Staver, who also serves as director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy at Liberty University, and provides legal assistance with regard to religious liberty, abortion and the family.
The organization may be best known for its campaigns to ensure that “public displays of religion” are maintained during the Christmas holiday, and it has adopted broad right-wing views, including the allegation that the Obama Administration has a “socialist liberal agenda.” But it also has focused heavily on anti-gay activism.
In 2009, J. Matt Barber, formerly with Concerned Women for America and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (see above for both), joined Liberty Counsel as director of cultural affairs (also becoming Liberty University’s associate dean for career and professional development). A year earlier, Barber had argued that given “medical evidence about the dangers of homosexuality,” it should be considered “criminally reckless for educators to teach children that homosexual conduct is a normal, safe and perfectly acceptable alternative.”
The Counsel also has been active in battling same-sex marriage, saying it would destroy the “bedrock of society.” In 2005, the group’s blog said: “People who … support the radical homosexual agenda will not rest until marriage has become completely devalued. Children will suffer most from this debauchery.” A 2007 blog posting said same-sex marriage would “severely impact future generations.”
Like other anti-gay groups, Liberty Counsel argues that hate crime laws are “actually ‘thought crimes’ laws that violate the right to freedom and of conscience” — an opinion rejected by the Supreme Court. In fact, the laws raise penalties for crimes already on the books — assault, murder and so on — that were motivated by hatred of people based on their sexual orientation. They do not, and could not under the Constitution, punish people for voicing opinions.
Since 2006, Liberty Counsel has also run its “Change is Possible” campaign with Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays to protect people who say they’ve changed from gay to straight from “discrimination” by “intolerant homosexuals.”
*MassResistance
MassResistance, “the leading pro-family grassroots activist group in Massachusetts,” began life in 1995 as the Parents’ Rights Coalition, became the Article 8 Alliance in 2003, and took on its current name in 2006. Its leader, Brian Camenker, is a programmer who was an official of the Article 8 Alliance and also headed the Newton, Mass., chapter of the National Taxpayers’ Association.
As president of yet another group, the Interfaith Coalition of Massachusetts, Camenker spearheaded the drafting of a bill that passed in 1996 and required that parents be notified of any sex education in their children’s schools. That same year, Camenker claimed that suicide prevention programs aimed at gay youth actually were “put together by homosexual activists to normalize homosexuality.” Later, MassResistance charged that groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which support school anti-bullying programs, actually want to lure children into homosexuality and, very possibly, sadomasochism.
Despite all this — and the fact that Cameron’s propaganda is widely known to be false or misleading — many groups have continued to use his claims, though often without citing their source. They include the American Family Association, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, the Family Research Council (see above for all five) and, until recently, the Illinois Family Institute (see below).
*Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment
Downers Grove, Ill.
Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (HOME) was founded by 62-year-old Wayne Lela, a former Catholic who now describes himself as an agnostic. Until recently, the 20-year-old group has had a fairly low profile.
The group, which is entirely focused on the alleged evils of homosexuality, attacks gay people on a wide variety of levels. But it keeps coming back to the idea that gay sexual activity should be illegal. “[P]enalizing people for engaging in homosexual behavior is clearly not discrimination, just like penalizing people for exhibitionism or incest is not discrimination,” HOME’s website says. In a second website comment, it adds, “[H]eterosexual activity is not illegalizeable … while homosexual activity is definitely illegalizeable.” And in a third, it insists that “legalizing homosexual deviations” leads to a “confused and sick society.”
HOME doesn’t stop there. It says that gays should apologize “for all the STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] they’ve spread, and all the money those STDs have cost, and especially for setting bad moral examples for our children.” It accuses homosexuals of having a “pathological attitude” toward the opposite sex. It says homosexuality shouldn’t have been removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. It says gays threaten free speech because they seek hate crime law protections. It argues that gay film directors are working to “condition men to bond with other men at the expense of women.” And it claims that pedophilia and necrophilia are a sexual orientations like homosexuality, going on to suggest that they could therefore be legalized.
And then there’s this: Freemasonry may be connected to “the homosexual movement,” with members evidently engaging in sodomy and “homosexual orgies.” Thus, HOME says, there is a “very real possibility that this group is using its influence to try to impose pro-homosexual ‘values’ on the public.”
*Illinois Family Institute
Carol Stream, Ill.
The Illinois Family Institute (IFI), which says it dedicates itself to issues surrounding “marriage, family, life and liberty,” is heavily focused on attacking gay people and homosexuality in general. It maintains “working partnerships” with other hard-line groups including the Family Research Council (see above) and the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal center based in Phoenix. In early 2010, it launched Illinois Family Action as a political-action sister organization.
In 2006, then-Executive Director Peter LaBarbera (see Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, above), told a religious-right gathering hosted by Vision America that homosexuality was "disgusting" and demanded the closing down of all "homosexual establishments." He called for the repeal of all "sexual orientation laws" — laws that ban discrimination against gays — and spoke of the "need to find ways to bring back shame to those practicing homosexual behavior."
Over the years, the group also has occasionally embraced the groundless propaganda of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, above). Until 2009, it carried an article on Cameron — “New Study Shows that Homosexuals Live 20 Fewer Years” — preceded by a full-throated endorsement LaBarbera. “Paul Cameron’s work has been targeted for ridicule by homosexual activists, and he’s been demonized by the left,” LaBarbera wrote in his introduction, “but that should not discount his findings.” IFI also posted a video attacking school anti-bullying programs that claimed, based on Cameron, that gay men’s median age of death is 42. Both were removed in response to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2009 listing of IFI as a hate group, which was largely based on its use of Cameron.
That response, however, hardly indicated that the IFI was backing down on its hard-line position. This year, Focus on the Family — for years, the powerhouse of anti-gay religious organizations in America — moderated its position markedly after founder James Dobson retired and pastor Jim Daly took over. In April, Daly told an interviewer: “I will continue to defend traditional marriage, but I’m not going to demean human beings in the process. It’s not about being highly confrontational.” The response of Laurie Higgins, IFI’s belligerent director of school advocacy, was that Daly was showing “surprising naïveté,” using the same language as pro-gay “homosexualists,” and failing to confront “the pro-homosexual juggernaut.”
In 2009, Higgins compared homosexuality to Nazism, likening the German Evangelical Church’s weak response to fascism to the “American church’s failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality.” Elsewhere, Higgins has pined for the days when gays were in the closet. “There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice… . [W]hen homosexuals were ‘in the closet,’ (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and ‘transexuals’), they weren’t acquiring and raising children.” She’s also said that McDonald’s, because it ran a gay-friendly TV ad, is “hell bent on using its resources to promote subversive moral, social, and political views about homosexuality to our children.”
Liberty Counsel
Orlando, Fla.
Created in 1989, Liberty Counsel is affiliated with Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., a legacy of the late conservative icon Jerry Falwell. It was founded and is still chaired by Mathew (Mat) Staver, who also serves as director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy at Liberty University, and provides legal assistance with regard to religious liberty, abortion and the family.
The organization may be best known for its campaigns to ensure that “public displays of religion” are maintained during the Christmas holiday, and it has adopted broad right-wing views, including the allegation that the Obama Administration has a “socialist liberal agenda.” But it also has focused heavily on anti-gay activism.
In 2009, J. Matt Barber, formerly with Concerned Women for America and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (see above for both), joined Liberty Counsel as director of cultural affairs (also becoming Liberty University’s associate dean for career and professional development). A year earlier, Barber had argued that given “medical evidence about the dangers of homosexuality,” it should be considered “criminally reckless for educators to teach children that homosexual conduct is a normal, safe and perfectly acceptable alternative.”
The Counsel also has been active in battling same-sex marriage, saying it would destroy the “bedrock of society.” In 2005, the group’s blog said: “People who … support the radical homosexual agenda will not rest until marriage has become completely devalued. Children will suffer most from this debauchery.” A 2007 blog posting said same-sex marriage would “severely impact future generations.”
Like other anti-gay groups, Liberty Counsel argues that hate crime laws are “actually ‘thought crimes’ laws that violate the right to freedom and of conscience” — an opinion rejected by the Supreme Court. In fact, the laws raise penalties for crimes already on the books — assault, murder and so on — that were motivated by hatred of people based on their sexual orientation. They do not, and could not under the Constitution, punish people for voicing opinions.
Since 2006, Liberty Counsel has also run its “Change is Possible” campaign with Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays to protect people who say they’ve changed from gay to straight from “discrimination” by “intolerant homosexuals.”
*MassResistance
MassResistance, “the leading pro-family grassroots activist group in Massachusetts,” began life in 1995 as the Parents’ Rights Coalition, became the Article 8 Alliance in 2003, and took on its current name in 2006. Its leader, Brian Camenker, is a programmer who was an official of the Article 8 Alliance and also headed the Newton, Mass., chapter of the National Taxpayers’ Association.
As president of yet another group, the Interfaith Coalition of Massachusetts, Camenker spearheaded the drafting of a bill that passed in 1996 and required that parents be notified of any sex education in their children’s schools. That same year, Camenker claimed that suicide prevention programs aimed at gay youth actually were “put together by homosexual activists to normalize homosexuality.” Later, MassResistance charged that groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which support school anti-bullying programs, actually want to lure children into homosexuality and, very possibly, sadomasochism.
At a 2006 religious right gathering in Washington, D.C., Camenker insisted that gays were trying to get legislation passed to allow sex with animals. "One bill in Massachusetts takes away all the penalties for bestiality," he claimed. "This is where this [homosexual] agenda is going." A little later, he added, "They [gays and lesbians] are pushing perversion on our kids."
In 2006-2007, Mass-Resistance pushed for an amendment of the 1996 statute that would have required that parents be notified of any discussion of gay or lesbian issues in the schools. The group proposed language that lumped sexual orientation (which includes heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality) in with criminal behaviors like bestiality and polygamy. During legislative testimony supporting the amendment, Camenker falsely claimed that no homosexuals died in the Holocaust and that the pink triangle the Nazis forced imprisoned gays to wear actually signified Catholic priests. The amendment did not pass.
Camenker, who has long focused on the purported “homosexual agenda” in the schools and frequently claimed gays are dangerous to kids, has repeatedly cited discredited claims from organizations like the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality that link homosexuality and pedophilia.
In 2008, Camenker made another accusation for which there was no supporting evidence at all — the claim that the state of Massachusetts had had to spend more money every year since same-sex marriage became legal in that state. That, he said, was because of “skyrocketing homosexual domestic violence” and because of the “extreme dysfunctional nature of homosexual relationships.”
In 2006-2007, Mass-Resistance pushed for an amendment of the 1996 statute that would have required that parents be notified of any discussion of gay or lesbian issues in the schools. The group proposed language that lumped sexual orientation (which includes heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality) in with criminal behaviors like bestiality and polygamy. During legislative testimony supporting the amendment, Camenker falsely claimed that no homosexuals died in the Holocaust and that the pink triangle the Nazis forced imprisoned gays to wear actually signified Catholic priests. The amendment did not pass.
Camenker, who has long focused on the purported “homosexual agenda” in the schools and frequently claimed gays are dangerous to kids, has repeatedly cited discredited claims from organizations like the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality that link homosexuality and pedophilia.
In 2008, Camenker made another accusation for which there was no supporting evidence at all — the claim that the state of Massachusetts had had to spend more money every year since same-sex marriage became legal in that state. That, he said, was because of “skyrocketing homosexual domestic violence” and because of the “extreme dysfunctional nature of homosexual relationships.”
This year, MassResistance called Boston Gay Pride events a “depraved” display that featured “a great deal of obviously disturbed, dysfunctional, and extremely self-centered people whose aim was to push their agenda.”
National Organization for Marriage
Princeton, N.J.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which is dedicated to fighting same-sex marriage in state legislatures, was organized in 2007 by conservative syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher and Princeton University politics professor Robert George. George is an influential Christian thinker who co-authored the 2009 “Manhattan Declaration,” a manifesto developed after a New York meeting of conservative church leaders that “promises resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same sex marriage.”
NOM’s first public campaign was in 2008, supporting California’s Proposition 8, which sought to invalidate same-sex marriage in that state. It was widely mocked, including in a parody by satirist Stephen Colbert, for the “Gathering Storm” video ad it produced at the time. Set to somber music and a dark and stormy background, the ad had actors expressing fears that gay activism would “take away” their rights, change their lifestyle, and force homosexuality on their kids.
The group, whose president is now former executive director Brian Brown, has become considerably more sophisticated since then, emphasizing its respect for homosexuals. “Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose,” NOM says on its website, “[but] they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us.”
For a time, NOM’s name was used by a bus driver named Louis Marinelli, who drove a van for NOM’s “Summer for Marriage Tour” this year. Marinelli called himself a “NOM strategist” and sent out electronic messages under the NOM logo that repeated falsehoods about homosexuals being pedophiles and gay men having extremely short lifespans. In homemade videos posted on his own YouTube page, he said same-sex marriage would lead to “prostitution, pedophilia and polygamy.” But this July, NOM said it was not associated with Marinelli.
*Traditional Values Coalition
Anaheim, Calif.
Former Presbyterian minister Lou Sheldon has been warning Americans about the “gay threat” since 1980, when he founded the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which also is concerned with abortion and national security and takes on liberal activists on a range of issues. The TVC, which today claims to speak for 43,000 churches, lobbies Congress and also mobilizes churches to oppose legislation that it disagrees with. Sheldon’s daughter Andrea Lafferty, a former Reagan Administration official, serves as executive director of the organization.
The group has at times enjoyed remarkable access to the halls of power — during the George W. Bush Administration, Sheldon and Lafferty visited the White House a combined 69 times, meeting personally with Bush in eight of the visits. But that does not mean that it has not long had a record of extreme gay-bashing.
In 1985, Sheldon suggested forcing AIDS victims into “cities of refuge.” In 1992, columnist Jimmy Breslin said that Sheldon told him that “homosexuals are dangerous. They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.” Sheldon later denied that he made the comments, but his website today includes strikingly similar language: “[S]ince homosexuals can’t reproduce, they will simply go after your children for seduction and conversion to homosexuality.” Elsewhere, it claims that “[t]he effort to push adult/child sex … is part of the overall homosexual movement.”
The TVC also asserts that “it is evident that homosexuals molest children at a far greater rate than do their heterosexual counterparts” — a falsehood based on conflating male-male molestation with homosexuality. Gays, it says, molest children at “epidemic rates,” adding: “As homosexuals continue to make inroads into public schools, more children will be molested and indoctrinated into the world of homosexuality. Many of them will die in that world.” With regard to LGBT teen suicides, TVC, under the headline “Homosexual Urban Legends,” claims that “[t]he cold, hard fact is that teens who are struggling with homosexual feelings are more likely to be sexually molested by a homosexual school counselor or teacher than to commit suicide over their feelings of despair.”
The TVC also makes assertions on its website about disproportionate homosexual pedophilia and attacks the idea that people are born gay and the claim that gays want the right to marry for the same reasons that heterosexuals do — the TVC suggests the real purpose of marriage equality is to destroy the concept of marriage and ultimately replace it altogether with group sex and polygamy.
Princeton, N.J.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which is dedicated to fighting same-sex marriage in state legislatures, was organized in 2007 by conservative syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher and Princeton University politics professor Robert George. George is an influential Christian thinker who co-authored the 2009 “Manhattan Declaration,” a manifesto developed after a New York meeting of conservative church leaders that “promises resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same sex marriage.”
NOM’s first public campaign was in 2008, supporting California’s Proposition 8, which sought to invalidate same-sex marriage in that state. It was widely mocked, including in a parody by satirist Stephen Colbert, for the “Gathering Storm” video ad it produced at the time. Set to somber music and a dark and stormy background, the ad had actors expressing fears that gay activism would “take away” their rights, change their lifestyle, and force homosexuality on their kids.
The group, whose president is now former executive director Brian Brown, has become considerably more sophisticated since then, emphasizing its respect for homosexuals. “Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose,” NOM says on its website, “[but] they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us.”
For a time, NOM’s name was used by a bus driver named Louis Marinelli, who drove a van for NOM’s “Summer for Marriage Tour” this year. Marinelli called himself a “NOM strategist” and sent out electronic messages under the NOM logo that repeated falsehoods about homosexuals being pedophiles and gay men having extremely short lifespans. In homemade videos posted on his own YouTube page, he said same-sex marriage would lead to “prostitution, pedophilia and polygamy.” But this July, NOM said it was not associated with Marinelli.
*Traditional Values Coalition
Anaheim, Calif.
Former Presbyterian minister Lou Sheldon has been warning Americans about the “gay threat” since 1980, when he founded the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which also is concerned with abortion and national security and takes on liberal activists on a range of issues. The TVC, which today claims to speak for 43,000 churches, lobbies Congress and also mobilizes churches to oppose legislation that it disagrees with. Sheldon’s daughter Andrea Lafferty, a former Reagan Administration official, serves as executive director of the organization.
The group has at times enjoyed remarkable access to the halls of power — during the George W. Bush Administration, Sheldon and Lafferty visited the White House a combined 69 times, meeting personally with Bush in eight of the visits. But that does not mean that it has not long had a record of extreme gay-bashing.
In 1985, Sheldon suggested forcing AIDS victims into “cities of refuge.” In 1992, columnist Jimmy Breslin said that Sheldon told him that “homosexuals are dangerous. They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.” Sheldon later denied that he made the comments, but his website today includes strikingly similar language: “[S]ince homosexuals can’t reproduce, they will simply go after your children for seduction and conversion to homosexuality.” Elsewhere, it claims that “[t]he effort to push adult/child sex … is part of the overall homosexual movement.”
The TVC also asserts that “it is evident that homosexuals molest children at a far greater rate than do their heterosexual counterparts” — a falsehood based on conflating male-male molestation with homosexuality. Gays, it says, molest children at “epidemic rates,” adding: “As homosexuals continue to make inroads into public schools, more children will be molested and indoctrinated into the world of homosexuality. Many of them will die in that world.” With regard to LGBT teen suicides, TVC, under the headline “Homosexual Urban Legends,” claims that “[t]he cold, hard fact is that teens who are struggling with homosexual feelings are more likely to be sexually molested by a homosexual school counselor or teacher than to commit suicide over their feelings of despair.”
The TVC also makes assertions on its website about disproportionate homosexual pedophilia and attacks the idea that people are born gay and the claim that gays want the right to marry for the same reasons that heterosexuals do — the TVC suggests the real purpose of marriage equality is to destroy the concept of marriage and ultimately replace it altogether with group sex and polygamy.
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh's friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh's party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn't want to fight them.
"We don't want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh's friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh's hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn't know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh's death was the realization of their worst fears.
"After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region," said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, "what the gay community has feared for some time has finally happened."
The Watchmen
Gay rights activists blame Singh's death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh's death, which they characterized as a hate crime.
Gay rights activists blame Singh's death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh's death, which they characterized as a hate crime.
A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.
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Mediabistro’s journalism gossip blog FishbowlDC has a letter to the Miami Herald from US Navy Commander Jeffrey D. Gordon–the chief spokesman at Guantanamo–accusing reporter Carol Rosenberg of “sexually harassing” him, including making comments suggesting that Gordon is gay.
In the letter to theHerald‘s Senior VP and Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal , Gordon accuses Rosenberg–who is the main reporter covering the military tribunals and operations at Gitmo–of “abusive and degrading, comments of an explicitly sexual nature.”To me, in front of another journalist with reference to why 9/11 co-defendant was Mustafa Al Hawsawi seated on a pillow in court:“Have you ever had a red hot poker shoved up your a**? Have you ever had a broomstick shoved up your a**? Have you ever had anything in your a**? How would you know how it feels if it never happened to you? Admit it, you liked it? No wonder why you like to stay in South Beach on your Miami visits.”
The letter also accuses the reporter of making other insinuations that Gordon is gay, as well as harassing and intimidating other reporters. The letter implies that this is not the first time Gordon has complained to the newspaper.
It’s important to remember that anyone can write a letter and it’s not hard to imagine the relationship between reporters and military press people at Gitmo must be tense. Still, this is probably not a story that’s going to disappear.
There’s always an interesting question of whether implying someone is gay is harassment or defamation (in the general, as opposed to legal, sense). On one hand, implying someone is gay isn’t always going to be an example of harassment. When used as a taunt, on the other hand, it clearly has negative connotations. For a military person operating under Don’t Ask, Don’t Talk, it’s even more complicated.
UPDATED: The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz is also following the story, with quotes from other reporters at Gitmo suggesting that Rosenberg and Gordon had a very combative relationship, but the reporters appear to be reluctant to call it harassment.
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"Lewd Conduct" & The Entrapment Trap
You're strolling out of the mall at closing time when the guy of your dreams starts cruising you big time. I mean, you pinch yourself to make sure you're not just daydreaming again at the A&F mural. But this hottie's for real. He motions to follow him into the bathroom. You're tired, and not exactly all fixed-up, and a quite a bit intimidated. But helpless to resist.
When you arrive at the urinal, he asks if you'd like to "jack each other off." "Well," you reply, "gee, um, if you insist, hey, sure, why not!" He suggests that you show him yours first. All too gladly, you do. Then he pulls out his…handcuffs? You quickly deduce that the cuffs aren't part of the fun and games. Your prince is really an undercover vice cop…and you're off to jail.
At the station, he types up a statement form and hands it to you to sign. The statement reads that you propositioned him…and then began masturbating in the middle of the restroom. "I'm not signing this. It's a total lie," you rightly insist. But the cop threatens to go tell the story (his version of it, anyway) to your family and your employer, and to stick your picture in the newspaper. Scared and alone, you acquiesce and sign the form.
Next thing you know, you're charged with lewd conduct and indecent exposure-charges that, if you're convicted of them, could land you in jail for up to two years. Worse still, you'd have to register as a sex offender for the rest of your life.
Sound too awful to be true? Not in America, you say? Think again. As a gay defense attorney with a primarily gay clientele, people approach me constantly with these sorts of horror stories. Police departments routinely "gay-bait" by sending their most handsome undercovers to seduce us into pulling down our pants. Then they play on our fear and shame to coerce false confessions. Prosecutors often charge serious crimes that carry draconian consequences.
Having confronted these practices as both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, I believe they represent a political assault on our community. Studies have shown that the overwhelming number of lewd conduct arrests involve gay men. Studies also show that police target gay men in the tactics and locations of their sting operations. Gay men disproportionately get arrested for activities which, if done by heterosexual couples or even by two women, would not result in arrest. In the law, we call this problem "discriminatory enforcement."
Political and legal action have brought about reforms in some cities and police agencies. In West Hollywood, for example, community outrage with the Sheriff's Department reached a boiling in the early 90s. Deputies raided our bars, entrapped us into lewd conduct arrests, mistreated us in jail, and in 1991 fired Bruce Boland, one of Department's only openly gay officers. In November 1992, West Hollywood voters narrowly defeated a ballot measure to terminate the Sheriff's Department's lucrative contract to police the city.
The Sheriffs got the message. They began recruiting from the gay community, and several openly gay deputies now serve at the West Hollywood station. The Department also started providing its deputies with county-wide cultural awareness training as to gay and lesbian issues. The harassment in WeHo mostly stopped. And after his election in 1998, Sheriff Lee Baca added "homophobia" to the Department's core-values statement. He vowed the Department would "stand against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and bigotry in all its forms."
In many cities, however, we lack the political clout to affect these sorts of impressive reforms. And police continue to use surveillance, sting operations and deceptive tactics to bait and bust gay men. Lawyers can help fight lewd conduct charges, frequently with great success. However, one's best option is to avoid ever falling into this trap. Thus you should be aware of three key things: (1) What sort of "lewd conduct" the law prohibits, (2) How to avoid getting busted for it, and (3) What to do if you are ever detained by the police.
What Exactly is "Lewd Conduct"?
Generally, we use the term to refer to three types of situations: (1) "lewd and dissolute conduct," (2) solicitation to engage in lewd conduct, and (3) indecent exposure. California law prohibits all three.
Lewd Conduct. Penal Code §647(a) and the case law define "lewd" and "dissolute" as "the touching of the genitals, buttocks or female breast for the purpose of sexual arousal, gratification, annoyance or offense, if the actor knows or should know of the presence of persons who may be offended." To be illegal, it must occur in a public place, or any place open to the public or exposed to public view. A "public place" includes, among other things, a movie booth in an adult bookstore, a public restroom toilet stall (when it's partially visible from the outside), and a car parked on a public street.
Solicitation for lewd conduct. The law defines "solicit" as "to lure on, to seek to induce, or try to obtain." A more simple definition is "to invite." Suppose, for example, you're out cruising. You invite someone to go with you to the park and do "lewd" acts. Technically, the mere invitation puts you in violation of the statute. If the person you invite happens to be an undercover cop, you'll probably be joining him not in the park, but in the squad car. Mind you, it's only "criminal" if you solicit him to do the lewd acts in public. If you invite him for hours of sex in the privacy of your home bedroom, curtains shut, that's not illegal.
Section (d) of §647 makes it illegal to loiter a public restroom for the purpose of engaging in or soliciting lewd conduct. Police sometimes arrest people just for looking camp, or for appearing as though they're cruising, while in a public restroom. The cops know it's difficult to prove exactly what someone was up to in the bathroom. So they typically use tricks and intimidation to induce the people into "confessing" that they were hanging out in the john looking to hook-up.
Indecent Exposure. One commits this crime by stripping nude or exposing genitals in public, or any place where others are present to be offended. But it's only a crime if done for the purpose of arousing the exhibitioner, or arousing an audience, or insulting or offending others. Prosecutors often tack on this charge to a lewd conduct case. Not only does it add to the total penalty, it requires sex registration for life.
What To Do…and Not To Do
Remember that even if your conduct does not meet these statutory definitions, police will often embellish their stories to build cases in court. But you can take common-sense measures to avoid these pitfalls. First, pay attention to your locale. Generally, the more conservative the community, the more likely the police will take to gay-baiting operations. You're in greater danger, for example, in Glendale or Newport than in WeHo or NoHo. Second, avoid cruising or getting physical in the two places that enforcement operations most frequently target: bathrooms and parks. Third, use discretion in responding to cruisy strangers, especially in places like shopping mall bathrooms or Griffith Park. You might get very luck if that hottie's genuine. Or be very sorry if…
Should you ever get stopped, questioned, detained or arrested for one of these offenses, remember three critical things. First, shut up. No matter what the cop promises or threatens to get you to make a statement, don't. Be polite. But tell him you won't discuss the matter without a criminal lawyer. If you're in custody, the cop has to cut off any questioning at that point. If you're not in custody, you still have no obligation to speak with the police, other than to provide your name and identification. Second, seek the advice of a lawyer, preferably someone with experience defending against lewd conduct cases. Most lewd conduct charges can be reduced to lesser offenses, dismissed, or defeated at a jury trial.
Finally, whatever you do, never plead guilty to a lewd conduct or indecent exposure charge. Never! Court-imposed penalties aside, the conviction can mar you the rest of your life. You may have to register as a sex offender. You may be precluded from obtaining a professional license (such as a nursing or real estate license, or a teaching credential). And if you're not a citizen, you could face immigration consequences such as deportation and denial of the opportunity to naturalize. It's almost always better to fight the case.
A Beverly Hills defense lawyer and former L.A. prosecutor, Neil Shouse deals extensively with lewd conduct cases.
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Last month, former Republican National Committee chairman Kenneth Mehlman came out of the closet, saying he'd taken 43 years to get comfortable with this part of himself. "Encouraging adults who love each other and who want to make a lifelong commitment to each other to get married" is consistent with GOP policy, he added. In a better world, conservatives would see the light, beg for forgiveness, and declare that gay-baiting was no longer a legitimate strategy for either party. But the fact is that gay-baiting, whether fine-tuned to the point of near-subliminality or outrageously transparent, continues to fit comfortably into the modern political discourse.
Generally, gay-baiting is the linguistic practice of publicly insinuating, with little or no evidence, that a rival might be gay, without ever using the word "gay" or homosexual." Successful euphemistic smears include "San Francisco," "weak," or even "hairdresser." The practice has been around since before the Revolutionary War, and recycles the same tropes. In 2010, of course, the difference should be that it's no longer a damning insinuation. Out gay politicians are members of congress andmayors of major American cities; Don't Ask, Don't Tell is on the way out, with the approval of 57 percent of the population; gay couples across the country raise adopted and biological children; and legal gay marriage is an imminent possibility.
And yet the bait goes on.
Baiting succeeds because it relies on the kind of bad joke in which many people still take guilty or not-so-guilty pleasure, prompting the defense that critics just need to lighten up. Just last week in Delaware, in the lead-up to Tuesday's GOP primary, consultants employed until recently by Tea Partier and Mama Grizzly Christine O'Donnell ran a television ad in which an announcer asks a person onscreen about O'Donnell's opponent's sexuality: "Isn't Mike Castle cheating on his wife with a man?" The person onscreen replies with a knowing laugh, "That's the rumor." Huh? Is this a joke? What rumor?
As underhanded campaign tactics go, baiting carries almost no consequences for the baiter; he or she can claim ignorance of anything but the literal meaning of the words being used to insinuate something very different. Baiting is adaptable to a wide variety of media—speeches, off-the-cuff comments, press releases, political ads. And given the Internet, it's more spreadable than ever. The most salacious or absurd baits easily go viral, often helped along by blog posts from people honestly decrying it.
In Mehlman's case, a reporter broke through this annoying cycle of rumors by just asking the man, and then pressed him until he came out and answered. Maybe this can become the future model: Combat the subtle and devious art of gay-baiting by just bluntly asking every time a bait is laid. It wouldn't hurt, either, for closeted gay politicians who vote against gay rights to come out of the closet while still in office and start voting for LGBT equality.
And so, without further ado, Slate's taxonomy of American political gay-baits.
The EuphemismsA perfect baiting euphemism is many steps removed from the realm of sexual orientation and merely relies on certain preexisting association in the public's mind. In the past people used terms with sexual meaning—pervert or sexual deviant, for example. This generation has a new set of phrases, most notably, "San Francisco," "wine drinker," and even "renter" rather than homeowner.
This television ad run by Republican incumbent Sam Graves against Democrat challenger Kay Barnes in the 2008 Missouri 6th District congressional race is a classic, so packed with gay stereotypes that it could be mistaken for a parody of gay-baiting."In San Francisco," sneers the announcer, "Nancy Pelosi is throwing … a ritzy California fundraiser celebrating [Kay] Barnes' San Francisco values."
One of the newer euphemisms to emerge is the "renter." In the 2008 race for Minnesota's 3rd District House seat, Republican Erik Paulsen's campaign repeatedly questioned Democrat Ashwin Madia's "lifestyle," a term frequently used by social conservatives in lieu of "sexual orientation." ("Lifestyle" implies there's a choice to the matter.) One specific the Paulsen campaign did cite was the fact that Madia had "never, never even owned a home." The subtext is not just that Madia didn't pay homeowner taxes. A renter is a transient, unwilling to settle down, promiscuous when it comes to real estate and, the campaign implied, who knows what else.
The Aggressive Metaphor
The classic of this category is the memo the Republican National Committee under Lee Atwater sent around in 1991. Titled "Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet," it compared the rising Speaker of the House's voting record to that of out gay congressman Barney Frank's. The slur met with criticism in almost every quarter, yet Foley, who had been married for 20 years at the time, felt he had no choice but to address the charges on national television, "I am, of course, not a homosexual," and deny them before his fellow Democrats, to the reported embarrassment of all involved.
The classic of this category is the memo the Republican National Committee under Lee Atwater sent around in 1991. Titled "Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet," it compared the rising Speaker of the House's voting record to that of out gay congressman Barney Frank's. The slur met with criticism in almost every quarter, yet Foley, who had been married for 20 years at the time, felt he had no choice but to address the charges on national television, "I am, of course, not a homosexual," and deny them before his fellow Democrats, to the reported embarrassment of all involved.
Atwater, by then an acknowledged smear-master, initially claimed that there was nothing untoward about the title of the Foley memo, then added that he hadn't seen the document before it went out and fired his communications director.
Weak and WhinyOne way to suggest a man is gay is to play to the notion that a man with a soft voice, touch, or walk is weak, and that weak men are gay. South Carolina Democratic party chairman Dick Harpootlian famously commented in 2001 that Republican Lindsey Graham, then a candidate for Strom Thurmond's U.S. Senate seat, was "a little too light in the loafers" to fill the shoes of his predecessor. Though "light in the loafers" is one of the most tired gay euphemisms there is, Harpootlian claimed he was unaware that his remark about Graham's loafers had gay connotations, to which journalist Greg Hambrick responded in the Charleston City Paper, "Apparently he didn't know what too thick in the head meant either."
During the 2005 Virginia governor's race, a local paper described Republican Jerry Kilgore's voice as a "Ned Flanders meets Mr. Rogers' whine." In other words, the guy's voice sounds gay. Then an ad for then-candidate and ultimately Governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat, called Kilgore "too weak to lead Virginia" and included the line, "Jerry Kilgore is not being straight."
In the 2010 midterm elections, the Mama Grizzlies have deployed the weak bait with gusto. Karen Handel, a candidate in the Georgia GOP's gubernatorial primary, informed her opponent that it was "time to put the big boy pants on." This year, gearing up for midterm elections, Sarah Palin used this bait on Obama, stating on Fox News Sunday that, unlike Arizona governor Jan Brewer, a woman has bigger cojones than the president when it comes to dealing with illegal immigration.
French Among the sillier cases of baiting in recent history is the attention journalists and right-wing pundits paid in 2004 to John Kerry's Francophilia. Men's rights site <a href="http://mensnewsdaily.com" rel="nofollow">mensnewsdaily.com</a> titled an article, "Men Are From Mars, John Kerry Is From Paris." Rush Limbaugh repeatedly referred to Kerry as "Monsieur Kerry" and "Jean Cheri," writing Kerry off both figuratively (calling up some Americans' notion that French men have innate homosexual leanings) and literally (Jean Cheri translates to "Dear John").
The New York Times may have helped spread the smear by quoting an unnamed GOP source saying that Kerry "looked French," a play on Kerry's French relatives and Swiss boarding-school education. The conceit worked well with the GOP's 2004 strategy to distinguish itself, the party of manly men, from the party of liberal flip-floppers. When the New York Times covered it yet again, Roger Cohen further added to the image of Kerry's effeminacy by quoting a Republican National Committee spokeswoman noting Kerry's "fondness for brie and Evian."
The Democratic VersionThe right is not always the source of homophobic messaging. Gay-baiting has a long bipartisan history. Despite the fact that most LGBT votes and campaign contributions—fondly known as theGayTM—go to Democrats, Democratic pols engage in gay-baiting almost as often as their Republican counterparts, and their baits can be far more diabolical. Take, for instance, the 2002 U.S. Senate race in Montana between Democrat incumbent Max Baucus and Republican challenger Mike Taylor. The Montana Democratic Party sponsored an ad showing Taylor, who owned a hair salon in the 1980s, applying lather to a man's face as part of a shaving demonstration. The ad concludes, "That's not how we do business here in Montana."
In the face of this betrayal by their supposed representatives, LGBT advocates often are reluctant to protest, not wanting to hurt the Democratic candidate's chances. If the Republican victim protests—Taylor called the implications "loathsome"—critics turn his objections back on him. Why is looking gay "despicable"? Taylor was asked. He quickly withdrew from the race, after rephrasing his objection to completely sidestep the true meaning of the ad. "Are they saying someone from my field in not qualified to be senator?" he asked.
LifestyleAt least since the 19th century, opponents, journalists, and others have called attention to certain male political figures' aristocratic upbringing and manners, their Ivy League or equivalent educations, and their epicurean tastes—also associated with gay men. The goal of this bait isn't necessarily to make voters believe the target is gay, only to make them think he possesses negative, stereotypically gay male qualities.
In the 1840s, supporters of Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison described incumbent Democratic president Martin Van Buren as "luxury-loving." Boston's pro-Whig Atlas described Van Buren as a "dandy" in "nicely plaited ruffles," who was "leading off a minuet" while Harrison fought the War of 1812. The Harrison slogan "Van Van, you're a used-up man," suggested squandered masculinity—whether on frivolous pursuits or fellow men was left to the imagination.
All of which bears a striking similarity to the ad all but one of Texas' major newspapers ran three weeks ago calling incumbent Republican governor Rick Perry a coward. Funded by Back to Basics, a political action committee formed by Texas Democrats this year, the ad describes the governor, "When he's not in San Francisco … Perry's … flipping through the pages of his Food and Winemagazine … in his fancy … rental mansion." This bait sticks not just because it is blatantly coded—"San Francisco," "Food and Wine," "fancy,"—or because it could also be cross-listed under "weak" and "effeminate" (the ad concludes, "Tell Rick Perry to stop cowering and face Texans like a man")—but because it refreshes public memory of the already existing, unsubstantiated rumors that Perry is gay. In 2004 the Austin Chronicle's Michael King reported the rumors in a way that both did and didn't discredit them, describing them as based on "no evidence … whatsoever" but "extraordinary in their baroque detail and remarkable persistence." LGBT rights organizations didn't object, probably because they are so eager to see a Democrat in office, especially given the Texas Democratic Party's recent revision of its platform to explicitly support "repeal of discriminatory laws and policies against members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community."
All the Single LadiesAlso known as the sporty/brainy-ladies-with-short-haircuts-and-no-kiddos bait. If a single woman rises to power in politics, her sexual orientation is assumed to be fodder for the rumor mill. Discussing Janet Napolitano on her nighttime talk show, Joy Behar of TheView asked two gay male guests, "Isn't she gay?" In 2009, the New York Times Magazine came as close as it ever has to asking a politician directly whether she's gay when Deborah Solomon put to Napolitano this nonquestion: "Men don't know what to make of women who choose to be single. Rumors of lesbianism have dogged women in politics like you, Condoleezza Rice and Ann Richards," thereby re-baiting both Rice and the late Texas governor. Napolitano in return gave a nonanswer: "I think the more people get to know a person, the less that becomes an issue."
Certain tropes—athletics, pant-suits, glasses, for instance—really help get a single-lady bait off the ground, and even the most dignified news organizations often can't resist playing along. The Wall Street Journal decided to announce Elena Kagan's Supreme Court confirmation proceedings alongside a photo of Kagan in her softball-playing days on its front page, and throughout the 1990s, Janet Reno's size and outdoorsiness were fodder for jokes around Washington and, of course, onSaturday Night Live. Journalist Michael Lacey once led a piece with the statement, "If Janet Napolitano isn't a lesbian, I'll eat your hat. She is a walking, one-woman LPGA tour." Media outlets ran articles on Rice's hardcore workout regimen. (The Rice rumor was also a spectacular example of the media re-laying the bait. The Times of London concluded its piece on the rumor with this bit of gossip from a <a href="http://washingtonpost.com" rel="nofollow">washingtonpost.com</a> commenter, "It is widely believed in gay circles that Condi is a lesbian.")
Unruly WifeThis rumor insinuates that a political wife who refuses to allow her ambitions to be overwhelmed by her husband's—who in this sense acts like a single lady—must be a lesbian. Hillary Clinton has been a victim of this bait throughout her career. The same Christian Action Network ad that announced the rumor of her lesbianism also announced, "It is rumored that Hillary Clinton will leave her husband upon taking office."
The ploy, however, is age-old. For an example, look to our friends the French. Compared with Clinton's, Marie Antoinette's behavior was proto-Gaga in its shock value, and the rumors about France's last queen were equally salacious. While M.A. wore the crown, anti-royalists circulatedpornographic pamphlets suggesting that she conducted lesbian and bisexual orgies at court. Here's an excerpt:
The Court lost no time going a la mode;
Every woman turned both tribade [lesbian] and slut:
No children were born; it was easier that way:
A libertine finger took the place of the prick.
The intended message was that if Louis couldn't satisfy, impregnate, or control his woman, he must be equally impotent as a ruler. It also portrayed the queen herself, in her exuberant disregard for court propriety, as a threat to the social and political order.
Lifelong BachelorThe newspapers of the late 1700s were filled with verse mocking bachelors' supposed moral degeneracy. But mentioning a politician's single status didn't necessarily suggest that he slept with men, says historian John Gilbert McCurdy. The implication was slightly more pronounced in the 19thcentury. When James Buchanan, the only bachelor president in American history, ran for office in 1850, the press alleged that his unmarried status made him an unfit executive. "He had no taste for matrimony, which plainly implies a lack of some essential quality," declared the New York Herald. "If he is elected, he will be the first President who shall carry into the White House, the crude and possibly the gross tastes and experiences of a bachelor." It's not clear to historians whether "gross tastes" meant sodomy or just loose women.
In the 20th century, references to a politician being a bachelor more explicitly raised a rainbow flag. According to historian Claire Bond Potter, the public easily believed rumors that the founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was gay because they felt that, "regardless of how many experts and former FBI officials denied it … as a lifelong bachelor he was obviously not normal." When recently retired justice David Souter was first appointed to the Supreme Court, he was also the target of the bachelor bait. Almost no media coverage of the repeated baiting of Lindsey Graham fails to mention his single status, as though to explain the provenance of the bait.
Before he came out, Ken Mehlman was often referred to as a bachelor in the press. In 2004, gay activist and journalist Michael Signorile wrote, "Mehlman must understand why his being a 37-year-old 'bachelor' who refuses to answer questions about his sexual orientation is a tip-off."
Lavender ScareThe early 1950s were consumed by not just the Red Scare but what scholar David K. Johnson refers to as the "Lavender Scare." In 1950, the State Department fired 91 "peculiars" solely on the basis of their suspected homosexuality. The Republican Party distributed a letter to thousands of members informing them, "sexual perverts … have infiltrated our government," and were "perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists." The equation of homosexuality with communist sympathy was a favorite refrain of Joseph McCarthy, who said in a speech he gave in 1950 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "Communists and queers … have American people in a hypnotic trance."According to Johnson, amid the fear mongering of the 50s, this correlation seemed plausible to the public. Both communism and homosexuality, Johnson writes, "seemed to comprise hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty."
It was in this context that Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Illinois governor who ran against Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956, became one of the highest profile victims of this brand of bait. It's unclear who started the rumor that Stevenson was gay, but we do know that J. Edgar Hoover kept a secret file on Stevenson from 1952 onwards and added the candidate to the FBI's file of "sexual deviants." According to David Johnson, the rumor was widespread enough that the tabloidConfidential ran a story titled, "How That Stevenson Rumor Started." To Confidential's credit, the article never revealed the content of the smear, and yet the editors were certain that anyone in any supermarket checkout line would know exactly the rumor to which the title referred.
But even in the 50s, smearing a political figure as homosexual as a way of casting him or her as a political subversive—without evidence that he was either—was nothing new. In 1751, the Boston Evening Post published a doggerel explicitly accusing the Freemasons of homosexual activity. Because the Masons were an international secret society, the "Continentals," colonists pushing for independence from British control, distrusted them.
"I'm sure our TRUNNELS look'd as clean
As if they ne'er up A—se had been;
For when we use 'em, we take care
To wash 'em well, and give 'em Air,
Then lock 'em up in our own Chamber,
Ready to TRUNNEL the next Member."
According to historian Thomas Foster, the poem also included the line "we don't use TRUNNELS with a Sister," indicating also a disinterest in women.
Black and Gay!The 1983 Mississippi gubernatorial race between Democrat Bill Allain and Republican Leon Bramlett saw one of the most sordid and elaborate gay-baiting campaigns ever initiated. Rather than limit themselves to an ad or speech, a small group of Bramlett's donors and supporters hired a private eye to investigate Allain. The investigator collected signed statements from three young black transvestites vowing that Allain, the popular attorney general, had on numerous occasions paid them for sex. During the ensuing controversy, the Bramlett supporters paid the prostitutes' room and board. According to the New York Times, the bait's masterminds also had statements from police saying they had observed Allain driving through bad neighborhoods in a way "consistent with solicitation of male prostitutes," which sounds rather interpretive. The bait was an attempt to appeal not just to voters' homophobia but to their racism, specifically a repulsion at miscegenation.
Far from recognizing the whole ordeal as offensive to homosexuals and African-Americans, Allain defended himself against the "vicious, malicious" insinuations that he slept with black men and associated with transvestites with the declaration, "No one looking at me … could possibly believe or even remotely consider the idea that I might be a homosexual, much less a perverted deviant who would pay for sex with these people." Divorced Allain instead read the shenanigans as a bachelor bait, telling supporters, "our people do not care ... whether you are single or divorced, but they do object to the kind of campaign like we have had to endure,"
To further clear his name, Allain submitted to and passed a polygraph test, and went on to win by a wide margin, capturing the majority of the black vote.
Radical OutingSince the 1980s, a small group of gay journalists and activists, especially Michael Signorile, Mike Rogers, John Aravosis, and John Byrne, have sought to out closeted gay politicians who oppose gay rights. Kirby Dick's 2009 documentary Outrage was about their mission and the debate around it. Openly gay Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank defends it, as does Andrew Sullivan. Others, like the Log Cabin Republicans, maintain that every individual has the right to come out of the closet in his or her own time.
Outing is distinct from baiting because it usually isn't couched in euphemisms. Since explicitly stating that someone is gay when he's not is still grounds for a libel suit; the outer is more likely than the average baiter to be telling the truth and have some evidence to prove it. Outing activists rarely renege on their claims, and in many cases they have successfully elicited a confirmation from the target. Signorile successfully outed Malcolm Forbes, Steve Forbes' father, and Mark Buse, John McCain's chief of staff. In 2004 Rogers outed Dan Gurley, the RNC's deputy field director under Mehlman.
Outing belongs in the taxonomy of gay baits because, barring evidence like Mark Foley's e-mails to congressional pages or tapes that emerged in 2004 of then-Congressman Ed Schrock soliciting sexfrom gay prostitutes, an out stands little more chance of confirmation by the target than the average bait. Closeted folks who don't break the law often come out in their own time, as Ken Mehlman did, denying or refusing to comment on charges from the likes of Rogers and Signorile's until the opportune moment strikes. California congressman David Dreier, whom L.A. Weekly allegedly outed in 2004, has never responded to the charges and continues to vote against gay rights at almost every opportunity.
One current target, Florida governor Charlie Crist, who is running for the Senate this year as an independent, maintains that he is straight, and probably no one will be able to prove differently. Crist has suddenly endorsed same-sex adoption, civil unions, and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, a near 180-degree shift from his earlier positions. Clever ploy, or is he telling us something? Someone please just ask him.
Click here to read an essay on the history of political gay-baiting.
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By Erin Royal Brokovitch
In 2014, Cameroon was ranked by Transparency International as among the world’s worst in terms of corruption — the 136th out of 174 countries. (Photo courtesy of <a href="http://Cameroun24.net" rel="nofollow">Cameroun24.net</a>)
The prospect of getting a bribe is a strong motivation for Cameroon police and prosecutors in their dealings with men who are suspected of being gay.
That was demonstrated in a recent case involving a 21-year-old university student known as C., who was lured to a meeting with a police informer, arrested, subjected to an anal exam, then urged to pay a bribe in exchange for his release.
In the process, police acted as though homosexuality is against the law in Cameroon, which it is not. Only homosexual relations are outlawed, not the fact of being attracted to people of the same sex. But the police never accused C. of having illegal same-sex relations.
C.’s problems began in November after police arrested another young man, A.H., age 22, who, like C., is a student at the University of Yaounde I. Police seized A.H.’s telephone and began using his contacts to seek other people to accuse of homosexuality. The case of A.H. was described in the article “Accuser relents, but police won’t free alleged gay man” in this blog.
On Nov. 17, A.H. fell into a trap laid for him by a correspondent on Facebook. He was taken into custody at the Ekounou (14th district) police station, where he was accused of sexual harassment.
Cameroon’s National Anti-Corruption Commission is ineffective, the anti-corruption international watchdog group Global Integrity said in a 2009 report. (Photo courtesy of <a href="http://Bonaberi.com" rel="nofollow">Bonaberi.com</a>)
Starting as soon as he was arrested on Nov. 17 and until he was released on Nov. 20, police combed through his messages and contact list in hopes of entrapping other people.
Between Nov. 17 and 19, relatives of A.H. began receiving strange calls from people they did not know who insisted on meeting with them.
C. was one who fell into the trap.
On Nov. 18, he received a call from someone who told C. he wanted to meet him. This unknown person kept sending C. messages, asking him to meet.
Finally, C. agreed.
In the late afternoon of Nov. 18, he went to the location for his rendezvous with this mysterious friend. It was in Biyem-Assi, near C.’s home and several kilometers away from the Ekounou area.
When he reached that location, police from Ekounou parked a car in front of him, forced him to get in, and drove him to the Ekounou police station.
There, they told him that if he admitted he is gay, he would be released. Naively, he did. Police did not do what they had promised. Instead, C. was kept in custody along with A.H., with both of them facing homosexuality charges.
On Nov. 19, both men were taken to the Nkomo district’s medical center, where they were subjected to anal examinations — an inhumane and degrading process that police mistakenly believe can determine whether a person is a homosexual.
Back at the police station, A.H. and C. were chained to the floor. Police accused them of being a homosexual couple. Each man swore that until that day he had never before seen the other.
Michel Togué (Photo by Éric O. Lembembe)
Michel Togué, who is apparently the only lawyer in Yaoundé who will defend LGBTI clients, appealed to the Ekounou district prosecutor to have the men released. The prosecutor asked the Ekounou police captain to unchain the prisoners and send their files to him.
The captain did no such thing.
Instead, he added accusations to the files, which is a classic maneuver by Cameroonian police who want to extend the detention of an arrestee while seeking money from them or from their families.
However, Humanity First, a local group that works for LGBTI rights and against AIDS, had urged A.H.’s family not to give in to police extortion.
The police investigator and the captain hinted to A.H.’s mother that money could bring about his release, but she dodged the issue. She had no money she could pay them, because a few months earlier she had paid 50,000 CFA francs (about US $90) so the same police station would release her nephew, who had been detained on different charges.
The police captain decided to refer A.H. and C. to the prosecutor’s office.
During the day of Nov. 20, Togué kept pushing for the men’s release, but did not convince the local Ekounou prosecutor, so he turned to the prosecutor at the Superior Court.
The men’s families began to panic.
At the local prosecutor’s office, bailiffs negotiated with C.’s family, telling them that he could be released in exchange for a bribe of 150,000 FCA francs (about US $270 or 233 euros) for the prosecutor.
Exactly what happened in those negotiations is unknown, but C. and A.H. were released at about 6:45 p.m.
It later became clear that the same police informer who entrapped C. had also entrapped A.H.
That man, identified as “Serge” in the previous article about A.H., works with the police to find young victims. He pretends to be gay so he can lure those youths into a police trap, which they can only escape by paying a bribe.
The author of this article is an activist for LGBTI rights in Cameroon who writes under a pseudonym.
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Filmmaker Ben Steele was the special guest during a recent episode of The Daily Show to discuss his new documentary Hunted: The War Against Gays in Russia, which exposes the gangs that entrap LGBT people and then subject them to violent abuse in the country
Steele spoke with host Jon Stewart about his experience filming these hate groups and shared his observations of the people who are enduring Russia’s increasing oppression of LGBT people.
“The vigilante groups are, unfortunately, they’re proud of what they do. They believe that they are carrying out good acts and they believe they are acting in the name of the majority of Russian people,” Steele said.
The filmmaker reveled he was allowed to film the vigilante groups after a long negotiation process in which he convinced them he was there “not to pass judgment — I’m there to film what’s happening so that I can show it to the rest of the world, and it’s for the viewer to judge the rights and the wrongs and the merits of what they’re doing.”
Watch a clip from the Steele’s appearance on The Daily Show below.
Hunted: The War Against Gays in Russia airs tonight at 9 on HBO.
THERE was a teenager in Arizona in the 1970s who “could no more imagine longing to touch a woman than longing to touch a toaster”. But he convinced himself that he was not gay. Longing to be “normal”, he blamed his obsession with muscular men on envy of their good looks. It was not until he was 25 that he admitted the truth to himself—let alone other people. In 1996 he wrote a cover leader for The Economist in favour of same-sex marriage. He never thought it would happen during his lifetime. Yet now he is married to the man he loves and living in a Virginia suburb where few think this odd.
The change in attitudes to homosexuality in many countries—not just the West but also Latin America, China and other places—is one of the wonders of the world (see article). This week America’s Supreme Court gave gay marriage another big boost, by rejecting several challenges to it; most Americans already live in states where gays can wed. But five countries still execute gay people: Iran hangs them; Saudi Arabia stones them. Gay sex is illegal in 78 countries, and a few have recently passed laws that make gay life even grimmer. The gay divide is one of the world’s widest (see article). What caused it? And will tolerance eventually spread?
Two steps forward and one back
The leap forward has been startlingly quick. In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to “eradicate” it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning “sodomy” remained in some American states until 2003.
Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. Gay marriages or civil unions are recognised in three dozen and parts of others. In most of the West it is no longer socially acceptable to be homophobic. Gay life in China is now both legal and, in cities, undisguised. Latin America is even more gay-friendly: 74% of Argentines and 60% of Brazilians believe that society should accept homosexuality. Thais are more relaxed about transgender people than Westerners are. South Africa’s constitution is remarkably pro-gay. The young have tended to lead the way: although only 16% of South Koreans over 50 think that homosexuality should be accepted, 71% of 18-to 29-year-olds do.
Yet there are still parts of the world where it is not safe to be homosexual. Extra-judicial beatings and murders are depressingly common in much of Africa and in some Muslim countries. African gangs subject lesbians to “corrective rape”. In some countries persecution has intensified. Chad is poised to ban gay sex. Nigeria and Uganda have passed draconian anti-gay laws (though a court recently struck Uganda’s down). Russia and a few other countries have barred the “promotion” of homosexuality.
This is partly a reaction to the spread of gay rights in the West. Thanks to globalisation, people who live in places where everyone agrees that homosexuality is an abomination can now see pictures of gay-pride parades in Sydney or men marrying men in Massachusetts. They find this shocking. Meanwhile some homophobic Western preachers have gone to fire up anti-gay audiences in Africa, and American conservatives offer advice to countries thinking of drafting anti-gay laws.
Revulsion against homosexuals is ancient, deep and, in its way, sincere, even if some of the politicians leading the backlash do so for cynical reasons. By taking up arms against an imaginary Western plot to spread perversion, Vladimir Putin and Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan doubtless hope to distract attention from the corruption and incompetence of their own regimes. But they have picked their scapegoats shrewdly: 74% of Russians and 98% of Nigerians disapprove of homosexuality. In places like Indonesia, Senegal, Uganda and Malaysia the young are no more tolerant than the old—sometimes less so.
Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism, at least in the long term. Urbanisation helps. It is easier to find a niche in a big, anonymous city than in a village where everyone knows your business. Gay life in the Indian countryside is still awful; in Mumbai or Delhi it is much easier, despite being illegal. In rural South Africa, to be openly gay is to court death; yet half of South Africans now say that their neighbourhood is a good place to be gay. As people move to cities, old traditions lose their grip; and by 2050 mankind is expected to be 66% urban, up from 54% today.
Emerging countries in Asia and Latin America have generally grown kinder to gay people as they have grown richer, more open and more democratic. The hope is that as Africa and the Arab world catch up, they will follow suit. Although religion is a barrier to tolerance—the more pious a society, by and large, the less enthusiastic it is about gay rights—it is not an insuperable one: plenty of devout nations, such as the Philippines and the United States, are friendly to gays these days.
Familiarity breeds tolerance
What could help spread tolerance? If the past half-century is any guide, the prime movers will be gay people themselves. The more visible they are, the more normal they will seem. These days 75% of Americans say they have gay friends or colleagues, up from only 24% in 1985. But it is hard to be the first to come out in a country where that means prison or worse.
Some Westerners would like to use aid budgets as leverage. That may have helped in Uganda, but attaching conditions to aid usually fails, and cutting it off may hurt the poor more than it helps gay people. It would be better to offer financial support to local gay-rights groups, to be generous when those persecuted for their sexual orientation seek asylum, to shame Western conservatives who encourage bigotry abroad and to buttress tolerance at home.
For those who cling to the notion of progress, it is hard to believe that tolerance will not spread. After all, gay people are not demanding special treatment, just the same freedoms that everyone else takes for granted: to love whom they please and to marry whom they love.
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