Rich's column in the NYT:
"Just How Gay is the Right?", uses the re-release in DVD of the 1962 film drama 'Advise and Consent' to make some points on what he calls a 30 year war on gays by the right. Author Allen Drury's novel turned movie was a best seller in the early 60's.
But when the pivotal gay plot twist kicks in, "Advise and Consent" taps into unfinished business that roils the capital as much, if not more, today than it did then. In 2005, homosexuality is no longer the love that dare not speak its name (the word is never mentioned in the movie), but as Washington fights its nuclear war over the judiciary, it is the ticking time bomb within the conservative movement that no one can defuse.
[snip]
[more in extended entry]
It's a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-"activist" judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they're for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that "Advise and Consent" so powerfully extols.
[snip]
What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war.
Rich sketches a few a of the gay-baiters in the current era who are gay themselves, or have gay children. Rich's essay is a good, but only partial view of the double-standard folks (gay in their hidden lives, anti-gay in public), but it is welcome to open the dialogue on this danger to our freedoms involved in the judicial hijack proposed by the right under the cloak of gay-hate.