Conservatives Canonize Pym Fortuyn

It's been curious to see some conservative pundits in the American media spend precious time and column inches lauding and lionizing a relatively obscure political figure on the world stage: Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who was brutally assassinated last week, allegedly by an animal rights extremist. Considered a right-winger by many in Europe and the Netherlands specifically, Fortuyn was expected to do well in the Dutch elections, giving him a significant voice in parliament. The posthumous accolades by some American conservatives have been couched in high-minded concern for civil rights. But underneath, there's something rotten in Holland.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has taken center stage in the bizarre canonization of the esoteric (to Americans) albeit tragic politician, running several editorials and commentaries about him, all fawning attempts to portray Fortuyn as not so right-wing at all?and using the fact that Fortuyn was openly gay to prove that point. The WSJ's online Opinion Journal went even further, pulling in a piece by gay writer Paul Varnell on the gay conservative site Independent Gay Forum. Varnell?who has angered gay Muslims in the post-September 11th days over his writings on Islam?defended Fortuyn as a proud gay man concerned about the antigay positions of Islamic fundamentalists, one of the reasons Fortuyn claimed he wanted to stem immigration of Muslims to the Netherlands. The National Review Online's Rod Dreher, meanwhile, took a break from his intense focus on the crisis in the American Catholic Church to write two columns (!) about the goings-on in the tiny country on the other side of the Atlantic, a nation whose political and cultural demographics are far different from that of the U.S. Various other online conservative writers have also spent a curiously inordinate amount of time on Fortuyn.

Now, I'm not going to split hairs about how Fortuyn should be labeled, nor pretend?as some of these American conservative writers have?that I am an expert on Dutch politics. Quite a few Dutch and other European publications across the political spectrum have called Fortuyn an extreme right-winger; others have pointed to his mix of positions, a hodgepodge of liberal, moderate and right, labeling him a libertarian or even putting him in league of his own.

It is clear, however, that the American definitions of right and left do not apply in the Netherlands, and these American conservative pundits know that, though they are playing fast and loose with the terms. (American newspaper reporters could be more precise with the terms as well, and perhaps should describe someone like Fortuyn as a politician "considered by many in the Netherlands to be right-wing" than to simply label him as such within the American context.) In America, right-wing after all usually means antiabortion, antigay and having "zero tolerance on drugs." But in a country where there isn't any considerable religious right?where gay marriage is legal, abortion is not an issue and you can buy weed at the counter in a cafe?left and right mean very different things. In much of Northern Europe, where homosexuality has been far more accepted for far longer and has been met with little political resistance, you can even be gay and be a right-wing fascist (just like Ernst Rohm, Hitler's SA chief in the Nazi Party, was). So trotting out Fortuyn's homosexuality as proof of anything is relatively meaningless.

But it is intensely interesting that American conservatives are doing just that. How weird is it that The Wall Street Journal and The National Review Online?no bastions of gay rights and libertine sexuality?would suddenly hold up a slain homosexual politician who reveled in tales about his promiscuous bathhouse jaunts, celebrating precisely that aspect of him? It is beyond peculiar that columnist Dreher, who has in recent weeks railed against the "lavender mafia" in the American priesthood and claimed that seminaries have turned into "gay brothels," is now sanctifying as a "martyr" a man who has flaunted his boyhood gay sex encounters?not to mention his champagne leather upholstery, his two precious little lapdogs, and, as one British report put it, "a butler called Herman, who was always fussing over him."

It makes sense, however, when you look at Fortuyn's signature position?the position that got him labeled right-wing by many: His plan to stop further immigration to the Netherlands by Muslims, people he attacked as having a "backward culture," pointing in part to Islam's antigay and sexist attitudes. Even more controversially, Fortuyn had campaigned to have an anti-discrimination statute stripped from the Dutch constitution, a position that got him sacked from his own party last year.

It seems to me that the conservatives' interest in legitimizing Fortuyn?to the point of getting down on their knees for a Dutch backroom cruiser?is in the service of elevating the entire issue of regulating and barring Arabs and other Muslims, and perhaps even rounding up such people here. When the dirty bomb goes off, this is the repressive direction conservative pundits are going to go (and it's not inconceivable that in these times fearful Americans won't be as receptive if not more so than the so-socially conscious Dutch). Fortuyn is their dress rehearsal.

If that is not the case and if I have erred gravely, then I would like to see an unequivocal statement from such conservative pundits stating that they have no interest in seeing such policies here, and explaining just what their true interest is in this obscure political figure.

I mean, really?suddenly, the hyperconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page is holding up someone who, as the editors describe him, wanted "to preserve Holland's liberal traditions"? The Wall Street Journal editorial page is lauding a gay man who took on religious extremists? Gee, quite a few gay men, pundits and politicians alike, have been doing just that for quite some time when it comes to Christian fundamentalists, but they've curiously not been lauded by the WSJ editorial page. In fact, the editors have often given their pages over to the religious extremists themselves to do their bashing.

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalists don't have even one iota of the political power that Christian fundamentalists have in America. Fortuyn appears to have been using his own homosexuality and gay rights in general to scapegoat a growing immigrant group that many Dutch have been fearful about, and it was playing quite well. But it is not a group that, within the political machine, seems anywhere near as close to affecting gay rights in the Netherlands as the Christian right is to preventing the implementation of rights for gays in America (and to turning back women's rights). In the reports I've read none spoke of a slew of other politicians championing the Islamic fundamentalists' positions and calling for taking away gays' and women's rights. In this country, however, the President himself has stated that he supports the Christian fundamentalists' positions, advocating an end to abortion rights and supporting sodomy laws against homosexuals and barring them from marrying and from adopting