The Gist: The Bigot's Bluffs

It was another surreal week in which the days blurred together. True, allergy season and heavy-duty antihistamines accounted for most of that, but events certainly added to the sense of disbelief.

Did Bill Bennett really, truly, gloriously self-destruct? It was only four months ago that he took home the 2002 Gist Award for Fattest Right-Wing Moralizer. Now he was toppling over like a Baghdad statue (and weighing in at about the same), exposed for having secretly gambled away eight million bucks at Atlantic City and Las Vegas casinos. Like Saddam Hussein, Bennett may now retreat to some hole to plan his comeback; the Christian right has a habit of pardoning its own while bludgeoning everyone else to death. But at least we had a splendid spectacle and some brief satisfaction in these otherwise nasty times.

Theocratic meltdowns of all kinds seemed to be unfolding throughout the week, beginning with Sen. Rick Santorum’s falling over a chair as he ran like a scared chicken out of a meeting with parents of gay people. The goings-on in my email inbox were weirder still. A press release arrived from the far-right Concerned Women for America, which included an imaginary interview with Congressman Barney Frank. The idea, as the release described it, was to try to help equip "pro-family Americans with answers to probable questions that arise in the media." Frank was posed as the interviewer, while someone named "Answer" responded back to his questions about Santorum and sodomy laws. It went something like this:

REP. FRANK: Trent Lott once compared gay people to kleptomaniacs. Isn’t Sen. Santorum doing the same thing?

ANSWER: No. Trent Lott was right about the nature of addictions, including sexual addiction, but this is different.

Soon afterward, a statement arrived from the actual congressman’s office: "My occasional interactions with Concerned Women for America have made it very clear that their grip on reality is extremely tenuous, but I had not expected the organization to confirm this voluntarily."

"What is interesting is that even in this format in which they make up the questions and provide the answers, the Concerned Women of America don’t seem to me to do very well in the debate. I am reminded of the hapless candidate who debated an empty chair and lost the debate."

A day or so later I picked up a copy of this newspaper on the corner of my block, and came across a side-splittingly demented letter to the editor responding to my column of two weeks ago on Santorum’s sodomy reflections. It was written by one Margie Phelps of Topeka, KS. Margie, it turns out, is the daughter of the crazed Rev. Fred Phelps, who has picketed the funerals of Randy Shilts and Matthew Shepard, among other notable gay men who’ve died, carrying his "God Hates Fags" signs. Just last week, members of the Phelps clan protested at the memorial service for Fred Rogers (yes, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame), who by all accounts wasn’t gay and had been married with two children when he died recently at the age of 74. I guess for the Phelps, perception is everything. "He was a faggot who poisoned children’s minds," one of them told reporters.

"You have reached new levels of deceit and depravity," the lovely Margie wrote to me in her published letter, railing against "fags" and their "mental, physical, emotional and moral deformity." She went on to charge me with "promoting sex with feces" and "semen-drinking," before noting that I had "lost all contact with reality." Okay Margie, you’ve got me on the semen-drinking. But sex with feces? You must have me confused with those presumably heterosexual high school girls in Illinois who last week were videotaped smearing one another with shit.

Things got stranger by mid-week. A report from the right-wing NewsMax site claimed that religious conservatives are supposedly ready to bolt from the Republican Party–as if they have anywhere to go–because they believe George W. Bush didn’t back up Santorum’s statements enough! Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly–who proved herself to be the most hateful mother in America when it was revealed over ten years ago that her own son was secretly gay–accused the administration of being "pretty limp" on Santorum. For the fundies, anything short of a full hard-on regarding their issues is "limp."

Fellow semen-drinker Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, momentarily snapped out of a two-and-a-half-year Rove/Rumsfeld-induced hypnotic trance, deciding that George W. Bush in fact is not as pro-gay as he’d believed, because he’d called Santorum an "inclusive man." Still, Sullivan held out hope that Bush as well as the newly chastised Bennett would see the evil of their ways and soon begin publicly supporting homosexuals, something about as likely as Margie Phelps admitting to using a vibrator.

As the week wore on, some of Bennett’s conservative buddies and defenders eventually lost almost as much credibility as he did, and they must be pissed off as hell at the guy. They’d immediately defended Bennett only to later have the rug pulled out from under them when Bennett admitted his gambling had gotten out of hand.

"It would be different if he had written anti-gambling screeds," Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said dishonestly earlier in the week, knowing full well that moralizer Bennett steered clear of the topic–a topic religious-right leaders like the bilious Dr. James Dobson are very clear about–precisely so that he couldn’t look called on his own behavior. Bennett’s was a case of selective omission from a guy who considered just about every other human activity a vice.

"Bennett is a big, sloppy Irish-Catholic guy from Brooklyn who believes in old-fashioned morality and decency," the equally big and sloppy National Review writer Jonah Goldberg bellowed immediately after the scandal broke. "He’s not perfect, but he’s been focusing our attention on the right things."

Yes, like fake statistics, fabricated by Christian-right-backed "researchers," claiming that gay men have a life expectancy of 43. Bennett relentlessly promoted those numbers in television interviews a few years back, even after he’d been debunked throughout the media by respected scientists and statisticians, knowing full well he was lying through his teeth.

At first Bennett tried to do the same about his gambling, comparing his hazy hours of high-roller slots to "church bingo" and claiming he didn’t gamble away the "milk money." But as the days wore on he caved in, making Goldberg, Kristol and the rest of his defenders look like complete fools.

"I have done too much gambling, and this is not an example I wish to set," Bennett said. "Therefore, my gambling days are over."

What would make Bennett suddenly cut his losses? Perhaps there’s a lot more delicious stuff out there yet to come. Here’s to hoping next week is as surreal as last.

Michelangelo Signorile hosts a national radio show each weekday from noon to 3 p.m. EST on Sirius Satellite Radio, stream 149. He can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com/).