A new round of outings of high-profile Republicans is occurring, and the most recent person caught up in this is none other than Secretary of State Condolezza Rice. WP Reporter Glen Kessler reveals the information that causes one to raise questions in his new book about her.
According to the book, Rice owns a home together with Randy Bean, a documentary filmmaker who once worked with Bill Moyers. Kessler made the discovery by looking through real estate records.
Bean explained the joint ownership and line of credit to Kessler by saying she had medical bills which left her financially drained and Rice helped her by co-purchasing the house along with a third person, Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor who is openly gay.
Blacker later sold his line of credit to Rice and Bean.
None of this, of course, proves that she is gay. However, it raises a lot of questions and has triggered rumors that she is. But she, like a lot of Republicans who have been outed in the past, has exhibited homophobic behavior. But whether or not she is gay is not important. What is important is her refusal to speak out when her opinion would have mattered.
For instance, she refused to condemn the execution of people in Iran because they were gay. She has been silent on the Bush administration's refusal to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell even in the face of ever-increasing troop shortages. Although she is not actively anti-gay, she has stood silently by as Bush and his rabid homophobic allies write anti-gay legislation. Although that in and of itself does not prove that she is gay, many people who are homophobic are also secretly gay themselves.
And by her silence on the right-wing's homophobic behavior, she gives her consent for their radical reinterpretation of the Constitution. It is not necessarily the Fred Phelps' of the world who are responsible for the lack of advancement on gay rights. Rather, it is the people like Rice who are silent and who refuse to speak out against that sort of thing who are the most responsible for mainstreaming hatred in this country. And Republicanism, totally devoid of ideas, is nothing more than segregationism repackaged and recycled for modern consumption.
And Raw Story quotes Steve Clemons as saying that this relationship in question legitimately raises these kinds of questions. I cannot speculate, for instance, on whether or not she is gay. However, at the very least, it seems like she is a highly conflicted person who is living a double life -- one as an apologist for an ideology whose mission is to promote homophobia under the guise of "moral values." The other life is the one mentioned here.
The main thing is, she had a well-paying job at Stanford. She gave it up for what? The fact of the matter is that she is a person who has totally sacrificed her ideals and her values on the altar of power and access. That makes her very similar to those in the press both in the Nixon and the Bush administrations who gave up their dedication to the truth so that they could have access to the powerful. In so doing, she has sacrificed a large portion of her humanity.
The fact of the matter is that she, like all of us, have the unique power to change the world and alter it in unique ways. That observation by Hannah Arendt, is even more relevant now than it was over 50 years ago when it was written. But when you sacrifice your humanity, you lose that ability until you are able to cast out the mote out of your eye and reclaim it.
And there is a broader question that is at play here -- where is she when right-wingers attack affirmative action? Where is she when activist judges decide that affirmative action is no longer relevant? When she actively works against the policies that have made her the kind of successful person that she is today, that shows how she has sacrificed her humanity at the altar of power even more. This makes her similar to people like Clarence Thomas, who benefitted from affirmative action programs and then turned around and opposed the very programs that made him a successful person.
