Contributed by Rusty DePass
Lindsey Graham is a queer because he supports amnesty for illegal aliens. So says William Gheen, head of an organization called Americans for Legal Immigration (ALI). I happen probably to agree more with Mr. Gheen than Sen. Graham on the subject of illegal immigration and I can think of a number of adjectives to describe Sen. Graham as a result of his position but queer is not one of them.
It is a sad fact of life that any man (or woman) who goes past the age of 40 without marrying causes some people to wonder if he is homosexual. With some it may happen before that, but certainly no one makes it past 40 without eyebrows being raised.
Some people, of course, are homosexuals and that’s OK with me, but I think such talk is patently unfair and, I think, suggests a real lack of substance and ability on the part of the accuser. There are plenty of homosexuals who are married, and there are plenty who are quite content to live out their lives without what the rest of us might call “normal sexual interest.” Who are we to criticize? People are different.
My purpose is not to get into whether homosexuality is right or wrong or what causes someone to be homosexual. That’s for another day—maybe—after all the mainline Protestant denominations have jumped completely off the cliff.
I find it most distasteful that we are subjected to repeated allegations that South Carolina’s senior United States Senator Lindsey Graham is a homosexual. I don’t say that because he is a senator, though if he weren’t, no one would care. There is absolutely no evidence of it as far as I know and there has been ample time for evidence to develop if it were true.
Former state Democrat Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian is fond of saying Lindsey is “light in his loafers” and making other cute remarks to try to discredit him. Those who oppose positions the senator takes often resort to questions about whether the political establishment in Washington has “the goods” on Lindsey.
Most recently those who disagree with Lindsey on illegal immigration have suggested he must be sexually deviant and is being blackmailed into taking the positions he has taken since they are somewhat outside the mainstream in South Carolina.
What is more likely is that such comments reveal a stunning lack of ability to formulate and articulate criticism. Frankly it strikes me as juvenile, puerile, insubstantial and vacuous. I wonder if homosexuals call each other “straight” when they disagree with each other.
I have never thought Lindsey was a queer and I’ll tell you why. In 1999 when he was one of the impeachment managers arguing for President Clinton’s impeachment, he did a masterful job which, as much as or more than any other, produced the impeachment indictment the House of Representatives passed.
When Lindsey ran in 2002 for the seat Strom Thurmond had held for 48 years, the Clinton people would have found out every detail of his supposedly deviant lifestyle and made sure everyone in South Carolina knew about it. There was an extremely credible candidate running against Lindsey in Alex Sanders, a former state representative, state senator, appeals court judge and law school dean. Result: Alex would have won the election. South Carolina is NOT Massachusetts!
After Graham got to Washington and took a few of those more liberal positions on some issues, Sanders, always the humorist, was quoted in Time magazine saying “if I’d known how Lindsey was going to turn out, I would have voted for him myself.”
I don’t know Lindsey real well and haven’t spent enough time with him to be any kind of judge of anything in his personal life. However, I think accusations like these against a public official in the absence of any evidence is very damning for the accuser because it indicates a lack of ability to argue his case. What does it say about Americans for Legal Immigration if all they can say is ‘He’s must be queer—he disagrees with us.’
If you want to put together a list of issues on which we might disagree with Lindsey Graham, I’ll be glad to help you and potentially it could be a pretty long list. But accusing him or anyone else (yes, Virginia, even Democrats!) of any kind of sexual deviancy without any evidence just because you disagree with them is out of bounds and those who do it should be ostracized.
[N.B. Gay is a family name in our family and we refuse to use it to describe homosexuals. Not using it is not meant to denigrate in any way our homosexual friends.]
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