Ginger Rutland: the Sacramento Bee's Staff Homophobe

[Ginger Rutland: Moral majority
Kerry ignored values, and it cost him
By Ginger Rutland -- Bee Columnist

Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, November 7, 2004

Ralph Nader may not have been a factor in the 2004 presidential election but Gavin Newsom was.

Last February, when the San Francisco mayor presided over a gay-marriage marathon on the steps of City Hall, he did more than almost anyone else to deliver the election to President Bush. Following Karl Rove's playbook to the letter, Newsom helped drive millions of evangelical Christians to the polls.

In the face of the gay marriage controversy, John Kerry offered a carefully focus-grouped position: He was against gay marriage but he was also against a constitutional amendment to ban it. He was for civil union, whatever that is.

But militant gays didn't want half answers. They wanted their status not just tolerated but celebrated.

You don't have to be a homophobic evangelical Christian to be troubled by the aggressive agenda pushed by some in the gay community.

Even tolerant, live-and-let-live parents residing in left-leaning precincts in midtown Sacramento are troubled when their kids are offered class credit for marching in an AIDs parade that looks very much like a gay rights parade. They are dismayed when the Civil War is given short shrift in an American history class while the teacher devotes two weeks to a discussion of the Stonewall riots in New York that sparked the gay rights revolution.

I voted for Kerry and would do so again. But by failing to confront the moral values issue more forthrightly, he lost the presidency. I don't mean he should have denounced gays. I don't believe homosexuality is immoral. But he could have taken the opportunity to talk about promiscuity, about rampant sexual excess and its corrosive effects on society, whether gay or straight. He had ample opportunity.

In the midst of the campaign, Bill Cosby provided the perfect opening. When he criticized the violent, profanity-riddled lyrics of hip-hop music, it set off a fury in the white and black media. Tone-deaf and clueless, Kerry ignored it. He should have taken up Cosby's cause.

There was also the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction flap. Here, too, the cultural elite tittered and winked and droned on about hypocrisy. It showed that they were out of touch.

It wasn't the nanosecond glimpse of Jackson's breast that troubled so many Americans. The whole crotch-grabbing, sexually charged gyrations in that tasteless halftime show (not to mention the ceaseless Cialis commercials) at the Super Bowl, the most watched family show on television, horrified millions. I can just see Karl Rove licking his lips and rubbing his hands with glee. Again, a missed opportunity for Kerry.

I want to offer an illustrative anecdote here, and I plan to be explicit, so you might want to get the children out of the room. Channel surfing a week or so before the election, I landed on a rerun of "Sex in the City."

The nymphomaniac character in that series is having sex with a casual acquaintance. He's vigorously engaged; she's looking bored, her random thoughts, unheard by the man servicing her, provide the background audio.

Suddenly her voice stops, she smiles, lifts the blanket and announces aloud in delighted tones that her menstrual period has begun. The man on top of her screams. I didn't take notes so I'm not quoting precisely here, but he says something like, " "Oh no, not on my Italian silk sheets. They cost $2,000."

You don't have to be a prude or an evangelical Christian to find that offensive. The crudeness stunned me.

"Sex in the City" is just one example of the soft pornography that litters our airwaves. Beer commercials are another. I've not studied the returns in Colorado, but I'm convinced that the Coors beer "twins" ads sunk Pete Coors' U.S. Senate bid.

It's not just white evangelicals who are alarmed by sexual excess. Most people of color - brown, Asian, Arab and those stalwarts of the Democratic party, my people, black Americans - are deeply conservative and troubled by a culture awash in violence and sex.

Much was made of the fact that President George W. Bush didn't meet with the congressional black caucus and genuflect before the nabobs of the NAACP. He still managed to double the number of black voters who supported him.

Why? More than any other segment of the population, black Americans suffer the direct consequences of hedon ism, of casual sex, homosexual or heterosexual. In too many black neighborhoods, the rates of AIDs infection, unwed motherhood and absent fathers are at crisis levels.

African Americans understand better than most that these "Christian values" of abstinence and self control save lives and give their children the chance for a better future.

Still, one of the biggest, and for me, saddest, ironies of this elections is that Kerry was on the right side of the most important moral issue of the campaign: war. Yet he failed to talk about the war in moral terms. Kerry never said it is a sin to kill for oil. He never said it is a sin to profit from war.

Instead he talked about strategy and tactics. Iraq, he said, was the "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time." He lamented the lost opportunity "at Tora Bora." He bemoaned the fact that "the president outsourced the war to Afghan warlords."

Kerry never talked about the president's disastrous domestic record in moral terms either. He should have. It is a sin that in the richest country in the word, children are homeless and hungry. It is a sin to deny health care to people or to despoil the earth.

I don't know why Kerry never did these things. I suspect it's cultural, that he is a hard-headed New Englander who has been schooled to keep his emotions to himself. His strict code, a code shared by the president's father, would not allow him to wear his religion or his morality on his sleeve.

I respect that. But that restraint comes with a price. In a contest over genuine morals, Kerry should have won handily over George W. Bush. Instead, he lost resoundingly.

I voted for John Kerry; I would vote for him again. I think he represents those values that reflect the true goodness of this country. To me, it's a tragedy he was not able to convey that simple but essential message to the American public.


About the writer:
Reach Ginger Rutland at (916) 321-1917 or grutland [at] sacbee.com]