PERVERTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: Please Stop Worrying About Other Men's Penises!

I am waiting for a politician who will ask, "Who are these anti-gay marriage busybodies to be so concerned with other people's penises?" Most of us go through entire days, sometimes weeks, without thinking about other people's genitalia unless we want to have sex with them.

Let's start describing this obsession of the Republican Party, this penis fixation of Wildmon and Falwell and Dobson and crew as what it is: a fetish. Some fetishists obsess about high heel shoes, some about women's breasts (exclusively I mean), some about French maid costumes--
and Rick Santorum worries about other men's penises and what they might be doing with them RIGHT NOW and what that might be doing to America. Whatever crime, greed, cronyism, illiteracy, job loss, environmental neglect and "Growing Up Gotti" might be doing to America, it pales compared to the destructive power of same-sex marriage and genital contact between members of the same sex! (Does Santorum remind anyone else of Paul Lynde? Or Tony Nelson, with Jeannie running around the house and all he wants to do is spend time with Roger?)

In the small but diverse town where I grew up, surrounded by blue-collar heterosexualists, there was none of this perverse gay bashing. It was a truism of my boyhood, learned from my fathers and uncles and the old men in the truck stops and barber shops: heterosexual men who were secure in their own identity simply did not worry so much about homosexual men.

The few openly gay men in the community were no more eccentric than the Sunday painters or photography club. K. and E. were like eccentric uncles whose difference added to the community; their homosexuality was no more irksome than the peculiarities of the camera club or the Jaycees, and I remember hearing more complaints about the Jaycees. If small town gays gravitated to the local arts scene, theatre and architecture and interior design, that was simply because those worlds were more live and let live about their inhabitants.

Men who exhibited homosexual panic, who talked about “goddamn queers tried to rape me” and such, were sniffed at by the rest of the truck drivers as being worried for a reason. When my turn came at 19 to be propositioned by a gay man (I was young and pretty then), I politely declined with no one’s feelings or noses being hurt.

My uncle’s concern baffled me. It would have seemed silly to have someone worry about me being seduced by our local gay theatre director. It seems silly now. How could a homosexual take my penis in his mouth unless I wanted to put it there? That would have been a poor substitute for the girls and women I had crushes on, who swirled around my adolescent brain in an unattainable hareem.

In panicky times like these, we must speak calm truth to hysterics. Anne M. Gobi, a Representative of Massachusetts, says,
"I haven't talked to any married heterosexual couples that have felt threatened by same-sex marriages."

Simply put, there aren’t enough hours in the day, what will all the other things I have to worry about. When clouds of the day part, when the demands of art and commerce are met, I selfishly start worrying about my own sex life. I'm not a patriot like Rick Santorum. Indeed, I hardly ever worry about other people's sex lives, excepting them as might intersect with mine.

It is time to confront public figures who espouse this kind of hatred against gay men and lesbians. The men and women who are born with an attraction to the same or rarely, both sexes, deserve to be left alone so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses. It is the Republican party and the so called Christian church that has been overrun by perverts.

Only three groups are so curious about unfamiliar genitals:

* Researchers and physicians, who have legitimate research questions;

* Pornographers, who entertain Americans to the hypocritical tune of $500 million to $1.8 billion dollars a year (the “$10 billion” often cited by crusaders and producers has been shown to be impossible);

* And Republican politicians and evangelical clergymen, who in a world of corruption, pain and ignorance can find nothing better to do their time.