Some people can wear funny hats with aplomb. Like Don Francisco of Sabado Gigante. Other can’t. Michael Dukakis comes to mind. But he has competition in the person of Rev. William Temple, Revolutionary War reenactor, Minister of God, and Tea Party media-whore.
Temple was in full regalia, including a Tricorn and what looked like a Trader Joe’s shopping ecobag, trying much too hard to make an obvious point at a press conference for the “Freedom Jamboree,” the Tea Party’s woefully unoriginal political event intended to generate as much agitprop as a guy in 18th century military garb can muster.
And generate agitprop it did. The conference, which included the usual suspects from the Cato Institute and even a letter, read out loud, from the cunning, ubiquitous Michele Bachmann, was dedicated to the usual deficit hawk obsessions and false statistics, all intended as a veiled assault against the New Deal and welfare queens. You could almost see the ghost of Reagan hovering above the podium, approving, if confused.
But even propaganda sometimes deviates into honesty, or at least character revelation, and this happened when Temple (a pastor at a “Christ-centered” church) got off script and starting perseverating about homosexuality. After threatening any moderate Republican (charmingly referred to in Tea Party speak as RHINOs – he even said he’s a RHINO hunter and pointed to his musket, I’m not kidding) that might vote to raise the federal debt ceiling (the purported raison d’être of the dreary event), Temple said he might excuse such heresy, if (and he made it clear it was a big “if”) the Republicans stopped the “effeminization” of the military by keeping open gays out of the military.
“Effeminization”? This is apparently a new code word the Tea Party uses for ending the doomed policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, as well as putting females in uniform. Into this mix, which sounded like the title of a video you can buy at Crossdressers.com, the reverend threw in just a little Islamophobia and rape scenarios to spice things up. Here are his precise words:
“When the Pentagon's own studies show that military effeminization may have an extremely costly impact on recruiting and retention, when Islamists have shown their willingness to sexually brutalize American female reporters, why would John Boehner's House Republicans be caving to political correctness? Why would House Republicans who know better be fostering inappropriate attractions in the intimacy of tents, bunks, barracks, platoons, subs, tanks, convoys, cockpits, latrines, showers, toilets and locker rooms when we are fighting wars in three Muslim nations?”
You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to conclude that somebody is thinking much too much about sweaty sex in barracks, and the pastor seems particularly worried about the homosexual kind. Added to the fact that the guy who made this comment is wearing tights, we get a little (unpleasant) peek into the psycho-sexual underbelly of the Tea Party, which is less a political philosophy and more a psychological dysfunction. It's not a coincidence that large number of the harshest homophobes turn out to be latent. Remember Conservative Republican Senator Larry “I am not gay” Craig. Remember Televangelist Ted Haggard and his masseuse? The list goes on.
The unusual thing about this is not the intimation that the Tea Party suffers from some crypto-fetish about becoming "feminized" (that's par for the course I imagine in Tea Party circles), but how apparently fragile is the pretense that the Tea Party is fiscally conservative, but not socially conservative. Their own leaders couldn't reign in their gay bashing, given a podium and a microphone.
And indeed, Temple’s tone poem about military men (and women?) getting it on seemed to let loose the floodgates, and the next couple speakers also got off message (and who wouldn’t with that sultry imagery suffusing a room full of boring reporters) and also picked up the gay bashing theme, though not with Temple’s apparent enthusiasm.
And so a press conference about the debt became an effusive rendition of forbidden army sex in loving detail. What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
Did I mention Temple worked for the federal government for 35 years, and now gets all those pension benefits he rails against? Actually that’s all I needed to say as far as the Tea Party’s hypocritical policies are concerned. But frankly, the obsession with feminization, like watching General Jack Ripper talk about precious bodily fluids in Dr. Strangelove, is much more telling about the darker closets of the Tea Party’s cultural fantasies.
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