Don’t Penalize Huffington for Being Truthful

OK, so the guy’s gay, live with it. That is the healthy response to the disclosure in Esquire magazine by Michael Huffington, the Republican candidate for the Senate in 1994, that he is, and has been since college days, a homosexual. Big deal. Ever since the Kinsey report, we’ve known that homosexuality is an immutable facet of American life, and it should not come as a surprise that quite a few are Republicans, even conservative ones.

There were gays in high positions on the staff of Ronald Reagan when, as governor of California, he launched the conservative revolution. Robert Bauman, a right-wing, even homophobic, congress-man from Maryland, wrote a book about his double life after being arrested in a gay bar. Last year Brian Bennett, the longtime chief of staff and surrogate son to gay-bashing former Rep. Robert Dornan, came out of the closet. So, too, did David Brock, who launched the Paula Jones sex scandal story with his article in the American Spectator, and also broke the Huffington story.

All the more reason to bemoan the capture of the Republican Party by those who would use government as a vehicle for imposing their values on the rest of us. Huffington now tells us that his moment of honesty may even lead him to become a Democrat--a damning comment on the narrow-mindedness of the leadership of his party.

Being homosexual is clearly not a lifestyle choice designed to interfere with the freedom of others but rather a sincere expression of one’s nature. The only alternative to coming out is to stay in the closet and live life as a lie. Huffington went the route of the lie until he could sustain it no more.

For most of his 51 years, he has been a poster boy for traditional values of guilt and shame, raised in the bosom of Texas conservatism by a Nixon-loving mother and an oilman father who was a major backer of George Bush.

In his Esquire interview, Huffington recounts a life of dedication to right-wing causes beginning with his cadet days in military school, where he distinguished himself by turning in the racier reading material of other students. At Stanford, he was a clean-cut leader of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom, determined to save the campus from the onslaughts of secular humanism and multiculturalism.

His early liaisons with men were furtive and respectably shrouded with fear of discovery, never evidencing the sense of abandon that some ascribe to gay culture. Indeed, in coming out, Huffington still insists that while he is homosexual, he is not gay. “The word ‘gay’ just doesn’t describe him. It really doesn’t,” Brock writes. “But he is homosexual. It wasn’t a choice; it can’t be changed. Lord knows he tried.”

This is someone who wanted desperately to follow Scripture as revealed by the religious right. It was as a result of watching denunciations of gay sin on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” that Huffington committed himself to heterosexuality. As Brock reports in Esquire: “At age 33, Mike Huffington made a resolution; I am straight, I will get married. I will have children. I will never sleep with another man again.”

He did hold that line for 12 years, during his marriage to Arianna Huffington, and fathered two children. He is by all accounts, including that of his former wife, an excellent father. But who are we to deny his claim that heterosexuality was a pose and that marriage of that sort could not be sustained? Whether Pat Robertson likes it or not, it was not in Michael Huffington’s nature to be what the dominant society insists is straight.

Does this mean he should now be denied the right to serve his country in whatever capacity would have been available to him when he sported the label straight? Is he no longer suited for government appointments that would have been noncontroversial before this revelation? The Republican leadership of the Senate unequivocally backed Huffington in his campaign to unseat Dianne Feinstein. If Clinton were to nominate Huffington to be ambassador to tiny Luxembourg, would those same senators refuse to confirm him as they had James Hormel, another solid citizen who also happens to be gay?

What the Huffington example illustrates, once again, is how viciously irrational it is to force homosexuals to hide their true nature as a prerequisite to being treated equally. Or to have any less respect for Huffington as a man or a politician simply because he has finally told the truth.