The Devil Made Me Do It

So Ken Mehlman has finally come out of the closet. Yep, he's gay. Mehlman, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign manager, has announced he's gay. Many Washington insiders already knew this, but Mehlman has made it official.
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Oh, Ken Mehlman, what to say to you? You headed one of the most virulent, anti-gay political campaigns in history, all the while hiding your own gay identity. Mehlman stated to The Atlantic Magazine that he secretly tried to work behind the scenes during Bush's 2004 campaign to try to quell some of the anti-gay sentiment in his own party. Who knows if this is true, we weren't in the room, but we do know that you, Ken Mehlman, stood by while people of your own orientation were demonized, ostracized, made the scapegoats for the moral destruction of America, and even, in some cases, beaten to death.
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You, Ken Mehlman, worked to elect and helped to run a political party and a White House which promoted many state-wide ballot measures that banned gay marriage, which promoted George W. Bush's 2005 State of Union Address in which he called for a federal constitution amendment to ban gay marriage, which promoted the squashing of hate crime legislation, and which prevented its representative to the United Nations to sign onto a resolution condemning the criminalization of homosexuality.
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Maybe you, Ken Mehlman, did speak quietly behind the scenes to try to improve the situation, but you also angrily defended and promoted the very people whose mission it was to discriminate against us and to deny our very existence. You are a moral coward. There is a special place in hell for people like you, Ken Mehlman, but we suspect you're already living it just by trying to sleep at night and look at yourself in the mirror.
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But now, putting aside the pitiful spectre of Ken Mehlman's self-loathing aside, his coming out puts a lot of folks, Republican operatives and gay activists alike, in a very strange, uncomfortable position. For the crazy right wing, it's another blow to the head in trying to sustain their belief that homosexuality is a perversion and inherently wrong. It gets harder and harder, pardon the pun, to maintain that position, pardon the pun, when so many of your own political party continue to come flying out of the closet. As Republicans keep coming out, one would think that even the most hard-lined gay-bashers would start to suspect that maybe they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to human sexuality, and that maybe their past beliefs about being gay are... well, you know, wrong. But we doubt it. These are the people that have putting one's head in the sand down to a science.
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More importantly, what does our community do with a newly "converted" Ken Mehlman. Mehlman has stated that he wants to work hard to help overturn Prop 8 in California and to continue to work to ensure that gay marriage is accepted nationally. He's even already started to help raise funds for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the group which supported the legal challenge to Prop 8. Chad Griffin, a political strategist who organized opposition to Prop 8, and Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar winning screenwriter of "Milk", are openly excited about Mehlman's help. Great! Right? Not so fast. Isn't this a little like putting Lindsey Lohan in charge of happy hour at the local all-you-can-guzzle bar and grill?
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Where is our self-respect as a community? Is no one in the leadership of the Prop 8 opposition ranks going to stand up to Ken Mehlman and say, "We don't want your help."? Aren't we just like the pitifully sad John McCain, who at one time fought for campaign finance reform, but then when he desperately needed funds to win his Arizona primary yesterday, he ended up spending $20 million to do it? In other words, do we stand up against people like Ken Mehlman, but then when things get tough, cash in all our values and self respect to greedily accept their help? Even now, according to public reports on www.opensecrets.org, Mehlman is still giving campaign money to those very Republican politicians who are most decidedly anti-gay.
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Yes, we'd like to defeat Prop 8 as much as anyone, but not with Ken Mehlman's help. He needs to go away, and get some very strong psychiatric help, and slowly come back and try to mend some of the horrific damage he caused in our community. Yes, he's now a bit sorry for what he did, but he also very recently worked incredibly hard to deny our very existence and our rights of equality as American citizens. Letting him have a hand in gay politics right now is a little akin to letting the fox too near the henhouse. Or in terms that Republicans can understand, it's a little like letting the toe-tapper too near the airport bathroom stall.