March 11, 2008

How Widespread Will the Elliot Spitzer Fallout Be? To Gay Americans, Very.

We’re royally pissed off at Elliot Spitzer — not because he was patronizing a prostitute (or ten, or a hundred), but because by letting his little head do his thinking, he’s really screwed over gay and lesbian Americans.

Elliot Spitzer was one of the best friends American LGBTs could ask for. He’s been a longtime advocate for marriage equality, and last April introduced a same-sex marriage bill in the New York legislature — the first governor in the country to do so. Although the GOP-dominated state senate killed the bill, we were hopeful that New York would be one of the next states (competing with Rhode Island and California) to offer full, equal marriage, à la Massachusetts.

Spitzer had also promised to sign the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA).

Now it looks like we’re going to lose our best friend in the Empire State. And even if Spitzer doesn’t resign (and, really, he has to; he violated the Mann Act), his power is effectively neutered.

We don’t care a whit if Elliot Spitzer wants to pay for sex, and whatever damage he’s done to his marriage (and his relationship with his children) is his own concern. What a person does sexually, in private, is nobody’s business — unless his behavior puts a crimp in somebody else’s freedom. That includes conservatives trying to force the rest of us to live by their “moral values,” or, in Spitzer’s case, a single individual setting back the march toward LGBT equality by way of a really stupid choice he made for his own selfish pleasure. In short, Elliot Spitzer traded our freedom for the promise of a lousy orgasm.

A lousy, expensive orgasm. It’s difficult to imagine what you get for $4,300 — the price Spitzer was going to pay for a call girl named “Kristen” — but we imagine it wasn’t seven minutes in the missionary position.

Whatever Spitzer was going to get for his money, he didn’t get it. We were the ones who got screwed — without, as my dear departed father used to say, so much as a kiss.

Then, of course, there is the damage Spitzer has done to the Democratic Party, the extent of which remains to be seen. We already have a hint about the extent of the damage he’s done to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; within minutes of the story breaking on the newswires, Barack Obama supporters on the Message Forum That Shall Remain Nameless were using the Spitzer scandal to smear Clinton. First, they somehow rationalized (if you can call this line of thought “rational”) that Clinton was tainted merely by her association with Spitzer, one of her most high-profile supporters; furthermore, they decided that this association by default cancels out Obama’s relationships with Donnie McClurkin, Kirbyjon Caldwell, and the rest of the homophobic bigots from whom Obama refuses to distance himself.

As if.

Second — and this is very real damage — the widely-circulated image of Spitzer’s wife, the silent, suffering Silda, standing by her man…

…brought the image of Hillary standing by Bill during the Monica Lewinsky scandal back into razor-sharp focus.

Literally. This is the image ABC decide to run to illustrate a piece called “Why Women Stand by Their Men“:

Counter-clockwise from upper left: Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Spitzer, Mr. and Mrs. Larry Craig, Mr. and (now ex-) Mrs. Jim McGreevey, and Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton.

What’s wrong with this picture? For starters, three of the four disgraced politicians are Democrats. Having researched political pecadilloes for years, I can tell you that Republicans far outnumber Democrats in the cheating department. Granted, represented are four of the most infamous sex scandals in recent memory (although it’s a stretch to call the Lewinsky scandal “recent”), but if ABC had asked for my input, I could have given them dozens of examples of humiliated wives standing by their men — from the other side of the aisle.

In any case, Clinton (Hillary, not Bill) is screwed no matter whether Spitzer resigns or not. As Peter Baker wrote in WaPo:

Spitzer has been a bad-luck charm for Hillary Clinton to this point. His illegal immigrant driver’s license proposal arguably became the first time she was thrown off her stride in this campaign. … That led to a bad patch for her that lasted all the way through the Iowa caucuses. …

Now Spitzer may throw her off stride again at a moment she needs to keep her momentum going. And on top of that, even if he does spare her by resigning soon, that has a cost too — one fewer superdelegate for her at the convention.

It’s not lost on us, by the way, that this scandal comes at the most inopportune time for Democrats — and at a very convenient time indeed for Republicans. (You’ve already forgotten all about Vicki Iseman, haven’t you?)

And it’s not lost on us that Spitzer was nailed by a federal wiretap — you know, that part of the USA Patriot Act that allows the feds to listen in on your phone calls for any half-assed reason they want (or no reason at all). It was the Bush Machine that turned the U.S. into “one nation, under surveillance” — and we knew Big Brother wasn’t going to confine wiretapping to terrorism suspects.

OK, OK, so the Spitzer hooker bust was a by-product of a “routine tax inquiry” by the IRS, and prostitution was said to be “the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators” looking into the suspicious movement of funds through Spitzer’s hands. But the timing of the emergence of a “confidential informant, a young woman who had worked previously as a prostitute for the Emperor’s Club V.I.P., the escort service that Mr. Spitzer was believed to be using” who enabled the investigators “to get a judge to approve wiretaps on the cellphones of some of those suspected of involvement in the escort service” seems awfully convenient. To the Republican Party, that is.

But, all speculation aside, what’s done is done — and what’s been done is irreversible.

As for how badly Spitzer has hurt the Democratic Party, hurt Hillary Clinton, and hurt us LGBTs — who saw in Elliot Spitzer the closest thing we had to a savior — only time will tell.

But it’s gonna hurt every last one of us.

And all because Elliot Spitzer couldn’t keep his penis in his pants.

Posted by: Sapphocrat