The news about Larry Craig this week brought to my mind a passage from a very good political book I read years ago, Leaving Town Alive, a memoir by John Frohnmeyer, who was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under George H. W. Bush during most of his administration. It's a very good book about how he battled for Arts funding in the environment of hate and loathing that permeated the Republican party.
In one passage, Craig talks about meeting with a group of Republican congressmen known as the "Acorns", and this whole thing is eerily foreshadowing of future events. I couldn't find any more information about this group, but based on the few member names that Frohnmeyer provides, I bet its members have quite a history. I'd love to have a complete list of members for a "where are they now" post.
To read what Frohnmeyer says about the Acorns group, follow me below the fold...
In my first two months on the job [in 1999], I was attempting to communicate with all factions, so at the end of October, Congressman Denny Smith procured for me an invitation to a meeting of conservative congressmen called the Acorns. Phil Crane, a congressman from Illinois, hosted the meeting in his high-ceilinged, dark-paneled office in the Longworth Building. [...]
He sat behind his desk dressed in a light gray, polyester, three-piece suit. His posture suggested that he claimed some authority over the rest of those present, although they did not visibly acknowledge it. It was the usual suspects: Dannemeyer and Dornan, Attila-the-Hun Republicans from southern California; Larry Craig, from Idaho; and twenty-five others. Dannemeyer was holding forth about the moral degradation of our country, and in particular the scourge of international faggotry.
He was reading from some publication that graphically chronicled the "unnatural acts" of homosexuals. He was in favor of quarantining people with AIDS and chortled about the latest homosexual outrages as the assembled conservatives plucked beers or soft drinks from the ice bucket on a side table.
They pulled their chairs into a rough circle, and Denny Smith introduced me as a fellow Oregonian. They wanted to know how I felt about obscenity, and I said I opposed it absolutely -- it was the antithesis of art, and anything that was obscene would not be funded while I was chairman. I was successful, momentarily, in persuading them that I was a responsible person, but as I spoke, I knew that my definition of obscenity (what the Supreme Court said it was) was very different from their definition (anything dealing with homosexuality, frank sexual imagery, or genitalia).
Indeed, Congressman Dornan several years later accused me of lying to him by saying that I was opposed to obscenity. But as I left Phil Crane told me just to ask if there was ever anything he could do for me. (What he did do, annually, was propose a bill to abolish the Arts Endowment.)
When I bid the group farewell, Rose DiNapoli and I walked back down the now deserted corridor of the Longworth Building. I felt the need for a shower. Rose said, "It's scary," an understatement of gothic proportion. The enthusiasm with which this group pursued homosexuals and espoused moral purity hinted at an exorcism of personal demons.
After hearing so much lately about the backstory of Craig, all of these clear warning bells that he was just crazy repressed, I looked at some of the others mentioned as a part of the Acorns. I couldn't find a listing anywhere on the web of members of this group of Congressmen, unfortunately.
Check out the Wikipedia page for William Dannemeyer. Wow, this guy was profoundly interested in graphic descriptions of homosexuality, also big in Boy Scouts. Uh huh, nothing there, I'm sure.
Bob Dornan was mentally unstable during his time in Congress, getting into a couple of physical scuffles. His favorite derogatory name for people always involved some form of "fag", and he loved loved loved to talk about how many children and grandchildren he had thanks to his long, happy marriage. That's pretty common among repressed people, to emphasize that they had kids, as though proof of having sex with a female is the garlic that wards off the gay vampires.
I couldn't find out much about Denny Smith, other than he was a vociferous wingnut and still is.
Phil Crane is another wingnut foot soldier who had pedophilia issues in his family (his brother was involved in a Congressional page scandal in the 80's) and also lost some glamour in the party when he publicly admitted he was an alcoholic. I don't see any direct signs from him of an obsession with "teh gay".