The Gist: Hate that Dare Not Speak Its Name; Sarah Pettit, 1966-2003

In one of those media moments so rare these days, the lid was lifted evear so slightly on the Bush administration last week, exposing some of the unsavory goings-on at the Dept. of Health and Human Services. A recent appointee to the presidential AIDS panel, Pennsylvania marketing consultant Jerry Thacker, withdrew his name–under pressure from the White House–after the Washington Post reported on page one that he had in the past called AIDS the "gay plague," had attacked the gay "death style" and had promoted the idea of "rescuing" homosexuals from their sin.

Those statements, and lots of other extremist blather, had for some time been sitting on Thacker’s website and on the site of the notorious Bob Jones University–where alumnus Thacker gave an antigay rant in 2001, equating homosexuality with bestiality. The websites were expunged of the comments just as news of Thacker joining the AIDS panel came out–a mysterious action that had the whiff of a White House cleansing.

Nonetheless, the president, we were told, was shocked upon learning of Thacker’s comments. Just as Thacker was withdrawing his name, Ari Fleischer said, at the daily White House press briefing, about the appointee’s suddenly public ideologies: "The president does not share [Thacker’s] view; the president has a totally opposite view…the views that [Thacker] holds are far, far removed from what the president believes."

Predictably, some gay Republicans were overjoyed by those comments. Log Cabin Republicans communications director Mark Mead called to tell me just how much, emphasizing, too, that four openly gay men had been appointed to the panel.

"We now know where the president stands–and it’s 180 degrees from where Thacker stands," he said with glee.

Perhaps Mead is right, in which case our president is either: 1) a psychotic with a split personality or 2) not in charge of his administration. If number one is true, Bush obviously should not be president. And if number two is true, well, then he actually isn’t the president.

I say that because the Bush administration continues to take actions that are in opposition to what the president claims to believe. Bush wants to "leave no child behind," but his administration underfunds education programs. He criticizes Trent Lott for his racist remarks, but then brings the racial lightening rod–and Lott buddy–Charles Pickering back as a judicial nominee. He stands firm in the war on terrorism while dangerously cutting and diverting money and manpower to fight it. He says he’s a populist looking to help the little guy, and then proposes tax cuts that will substantially help the big guys.

The Thacker appointment wasn’t the first time that the Bushies had thrown gays to the Christian right like red meat to a pack of wolves, only to later profess bewilderment that anyone would think they were insensitive. Back in July 2001, the Washington Post revealed–also on page one–that White House mastermind Karl Rove had cut a deal with the Salvation Army. He’d promised that Bush’s new faith-based initiative programs would make the not-so-gay-friendly group exempt from antidiscrimination laws that protect gays. In return, the group would spend a million bucks on Republican lobbyists, including money for a major Bush campaign strategist. Exposed, the administration quickly responded that it had no plans to do anything of the kind–though, actually, only a few weeks ago Bush signed faith-based executive orders that in fact appear to allow the Salvation Army to discriminate against gays exactly as it had been promised in the original, secret Rovian pact.

So, even if Log Cabin’s Mead is correct in saying that the president doesn’t agree with people like Thacker, what does it really matter, since his administration often does the complete opposite of what he says he believes? Thacker, after all, would now be sitting on the AIDS commission if not for his recently purged words landing on the front pages.

Carl Schmid, a more forthcoming gay Republican who worked on Bush’s 2000 campaign but has been disillusioned by these kinds of maneuvers, comments that "Thacker reflects the same views as people in the administration. There are people who are definitely antigay in HHS. I’m glad to hear Bush’s words, but there’s a dichotomy. The administration is speaking with two voices."

Or is it? Does Bush really disagree all that much with Thacker? Or was Thacker just too blunt, not choosing his words carefully enough from the "compassionate conservative" playbook?

When you strip away Thacker’s sensational terminology, his actual policy proposals aren’t much different from those of other Bush appointees on the AIDS panel, or those of Bush himself. They may not talk of the gay "death style," but their positions on public health are nonetheless anti-scientific, based on moralistic, religious ideologies. The panel’s executive director, Pat Funderburk-Ware, is an abstinence-only devotee who gave a notorious speech to the panel last year, calling for promotion of abstinence until marriage to stem HIV–a policy that ignores gay men entirely, since they can’t get married, and a policy that is promoted by Thacker as well. Complaints about Ware’s speech by some on the panel appear to have led to Ware’s being ousted. But she was brought back–according to two members of the panel who say Ware bragged about it to them–when the bilious Christian right leader Dr. James Dobson complained on her behalf to Karl Rove.

The panel’s actual prevention committee is run by conservative activist Anita Smith, another staunch abstinence-only devotee who has worked to defund prevention efforts targeted to gays. The panel’s cochair, Tom Coburn, is a former Oklahoma House member who was among the most stridently antigay legislators in Congress, a man whose voting record surely makes Thacker proud. Coburn has now assigned Gabriel Rotello’s important book Sexual Ecology as required reading for the panel, but Coburn seems to be set on misusing the book dangerously. Word is that he’s enthralled with the first half of the book, which details gay male sexual patterns since the beginning of the epidemic, and doesn’t want anything to do with the second half of the book, which calls for government sanction of same-sex marriage. In other words, labeling and targeting the "death style" without promoting "lifestyle."

Coburn, who was appointed in 2001 with great fanfare, even defended Thacker’s appointment, saying Thacker’s comments on homosexuality were "irrelevant" to his work on the AIDS commission. That was a clear admission that Thacker’s actual policy positions, if not his inflammatory language, are in sync with those of the rest of the panel and with Bush. But like Trent Lott, Thacker’s sin was to be honest rather than speak in code, the "compassionate conservative" way. In George W. Bush’s White House, we might call these the policies that dare not speak their name.

Sarah Pettit, 1966-2003

Newsweek lost its gifted arts editor last week when Sarah Pettit died, at the age of 36, from complications of lymphoma. And those of us who worked with Sarah in the early days of her pioneering journalism career lost a dear friend and a conscience.

Sarah was smart, intense, wry, sexy and sometimes very angry–everything that makes a passionate, great editor. Those qualities were perhaps no more on display than at the fiery OutWeek magazine, where we worked side by side as editors, along with a host of other combative editors, writers and staffers, from 1989 through 1991. We screamed and yelled and had knock-down, drag-out fights. Then we’d go out for drinks.

OutWeek was part of a revolution in the gay movement in New York, taking the energy off of the streets from groups like ACT UP to a larger audience. As arts editor, Sarah zeroed in on the explosion of queer culture coming out of those movements, from the new queer cinema that spawned filmmakers like Todd Haynes to the performance artists such as Tim Miller and Holly Hughes, who were swept up in Jesse Helms’ sinister political firestorms. Sarah understood the connections between culture and politics better than any of us, and she had a world view that was remarkably, intimidatingly broad.

She took that with her when she cofounded Out magazine with Michael Goff in 1992, for which I wrote a column for several years. She pushed me to write better, to reach farther. After she joined Newsweek in 1999 as a senior editor, she often served as the publication’s "loyal opposition," as editors Mark Whitaker and Dorothy Kalins noted in a staff memo. That was Sarah, always challenging, always inspiring.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com)