[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 103 (Friday, July 12, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H7517-H7528]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
U.S.S. ``GARY GORDON''
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. DORNAN. Well, Madam Speaker, I guess it is clear for the whole
world to see there will not be an hour special order by the Member from
Massachusetts followed by my special order. Mr. Frank told me earlier
in the week that he was going to critique my point of personal
privilege from this well on June 27, and I said, ``Well good I'll be
there to critique your hour with my hour,'' because I said I would keep
focused on the truth and I was not going to let go of this crude
attempt which we saw again last night late and on the floor this
morning and early afternoon to brand anybody who thinks there is
something wrong with homosexual behavior as a bigot, as a hater, and,
as Mr. Canady of Florida pointed out, they added about 15 more sleazy
words that we could have spent all day long taking peoples' words down
to contest.
I would like to tell any people that came to visit us in the gallery
today, through the Chair, that I will return to this subject after I do
something very positive and upbeat to relate what I was privileged to
behold on the Fourth of July, and I would hope that people would
reflect on the positives about the United States over this weekend, but
spend a little time thinking about this amazing vote that we just had,
our last vote today, on the 12th of July, defeating a phony recommit
bill with instructions to study homosexual, quote, marriage, unquote,
when that study is going ahead anyway. So 30 Republicans, kind of
threw--well 29 threw a vote in this direction and joined Mr. Gunderson
so that they will be able to have begging rights not to have Act Up and
other radical homosexual groups try and wreck their town hall meetings
with rude demonstrations, and the Democratic vote did not shift that
much, 133 for the phony recommit and 118 to back up--or, excuse me,
only 65--let me back up; 53 voted against Democrats, that phony motion
to recommit, and that jumped up to 65 going the other way and saying
that they will go out on a limb for homosexual marriage.
The final vote is, in this Chamber, 118 Democrats in spite of the 2-
day debate going with Clinton, that they are not going to sign off on
homosexuals getting married civilly, although a few renegade Christian
denominations that are splitting in pieces will go ahead and go through
a mock marriage ceremony, but 118 Democrats joined Clinton and say no
way. The one Independent from Vermont, 65 Democrats and only one
Republican, Mr. Gunderson, that is 67 people today and 2 voting
present, approve of homosexual marriage. There were 23 not voting; that
is not unusual for a get-away Friday, although I noticed in the
Democratic list here at least 3 Democrats that were participating in
the debate right up through recommit and the final passage vote, which
was only a 5-minute vote followed immediately thereafter, and they
ditched, I will give them the benefit of the doubt, jump in a car and
speed off to National Airport or Dulles to get out of town. But it
looks very suspicious.
So there is the vote: 23 absent, 2 present, 67 with only one
Republican, the sole Independent who usually votes in caucuses on the
other side of the aisle, and 65 Democrats saying homosexual marriage is
OK. On our side 224 Republicans out of 225 voting, and 118 Democrats,
for a total of 342, say no way to homosexual marriage.
So, it looks like my opening remarks in the well June 27, when, as I
recall, I said:
Mr. Speaker, I now move out into the evil mind fields of political
correctness alone, but I pray and hope not alone on this uncomfortable
issue of homosexuality. Well, it looks like I am not alone. Fifteen
days later, on the 12th of July, 1996, 342 souls have joined me with
varying degrees of commitment to principle and Judeo-Christian ethics.
Now to that positive note: On July 4, I had the honor of being
invited by the families of Americans who lost their fighting men in the
alleys of Mogadishu on October 3 and 4, 1993, not quite 3 years ago. It
was the second ceremony, unprecedented, where a naval ship, a big naval
ship, 956 feet of naval cargo ship, was being named after an army
sergeant. The first one took place in San Diego where the U.S. Naval
Ship Randall Sugart was named, with his mother and father and his wife
presiding, and that was on May 13--excuse me, Jefferson's birthday,
April 13--and then on July 4, the second commissioning of the U.S.
Naval Ship Gary Ivan Gordon. Both of these army sergeants won the Medal
of Honor, fulfilling to the letter of the scripture St. John 15:13,
greater love than this no one has that he give his life for his
friends. A biblical translation: that they lay down their life for
another. They begged to have their helicopter crew get the authority to
put them down at the crash site of CWO Michael Durant that ended up
saving his life and giving up their own lives. On the night of October
3 the film was so brutal, a videotape on CNN, that they stopped running
it by midnight because of people crying and calling in. The film, the
videotape, was so brutal. These two Medal of Honor winners, the copilot
and I got to meet his widow, Willie Frank, down there at Newport News
at the commissioning of the Gary Gordon, the two door gunners, Tommy
Fields and William David Cleveland. We saw their bodies being hacked
apart by the crowds, desecrated, dragged through the streets, objects
stuck in their gaping dead mouths. It was a pretty rough scene, the
roughest Americans have seen since Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and
now we have these 2 beautiful days, Jefferson's birthday and fourth of
July, when as long as these ships are at sea and they have invited the
families, the skippers of the two ships, they will be crewed by
civilians, to come on board at any time.
I saw them invite Gary Gordon's two beautiful children, 8-year-old
Ian and 5-year-old Brittany, to come on board any time to see this
massive ship sitting next to our newest supercarrier, the U.S.S.
Stennis, named after a U.S. Senator who was alive when the ship was
commissioned, got to see a ship with his name on it when he is alive,
the biggest moving object on the planet Earth.
These two big ships sat there, the Stennis and the Gary Gordon, and
Golden Knight or Special Forces paratroopers came in, one from each
service with American flags flying off their parachute gear, and
landed. There was a small parade of World War II vehicles that went up
the ramp onto the Gary Gordon, which will be a prepositioned ship with
enough armored vehicles, backup vehicles, Humvees, trucks, tankers,
supplies, ammunition to support a third of the division.
A full Army brigade will be ready to go at sea anywhere in the world
to protect Americans or American interests, and M. Sgt. Gary Gordon's
name; I visited his grave last November 5 or November 4, remember as
the day Rabin was assassinated, and I stood at his
[[Page H7518]]
grave with my son, Mark, and told Mark, beneath us are the remains torn
apart of this handsome, tough, dedicated 33-year-old Army Delta Force
sergeant, and I said, ``And like Jesus at 33, he was torn apart giving
his life for the literal life of Michael Durant and others.''
Well, he has a wife about as beautiful as they come, reminded me of
my own beautiful wife when she was a young Air Force wife, and I
punched out of two jets, and she wondered if she was going to have a
father for our five young kids.
But Carmen had such dignity. Before she broke the champagne bottle on
this almost-thousand-foot ship named after her Gary, she said these
words, and if she got through it, I get through it. July 4, Newport
News, shipbuilding Newport News, Va, the naming ceremony for U.S. Naval
Ship Gordon, T-A-K-R, 296; that is its formal number.
For you Navy buffs out there I found out what it means. Nobody knew.
It took me all day. T means crewed by civilians, A means auxiliary, K
means cargo because the C is used for cruisers, and R means rapid
response.
{time} 1530
Here are Carmen's beautiful words:
``Thank you for that kind introduction, and the opportunity to be
with you today. I would like to tell you about Gary. Just behind a
small door in his bedroom closet, my son Ian has stored the treasures
dearest to him: The uniforms his father wore, the canteens he drank
from, the hammock he slung in so many corners of the world, they are
all there; the boots that took his dad through so many deserts,
jungles, so many parachute jumps now lace up around Ian's small ankles.
All these things are piled neatly together by a little boy's hands and
sought out during quiet times.
``My daughter Brittany,'' and keep in mind they are both sitting in
the front row, ``My daughter Brittany keeps a photograph of her daddy
next to her small white bed, the big 8 by 10 of Gary smiling straight
through to her. It is the first thing she packs whenever we leave home,
and the first thing she unpacks when she arrives anywhere.''
By the way, Gary Gordon's dad, who felt very uncomfortable receiving
the Medal of Honor from Clinton, both he and Randy Shugert's father did
not feel that Clinton had done right by these Medal of Honor-winning
sons, that he did not understand the operation, did not back them up
with armor to rescue the downed helicopters, did not back them up with
enough wherewithal to capture the warlord that they were pursuing;
warlords.
I have spoken to Gary's father, as I have spoken to Herb and Lois
Shugert many times. Gary's dad died on the job the last day of June, 5
days before the naming ceremony for his son's ship. He died at the
naming ceremony for his son's ship. He died at the mill where he had
worked all his life, in Lincoln, Maine, unloading his truck, probably
so proudly talking about how he was looking forward to going to
Virginia to watch his daughter-in-law christen the Gary Gordon.
I looked up at the ship. I told this to Carmen later. I told her it
was probably the Irish in me, but I looked up at the ship, its massive
side, and at the railing, and I pictured Gary and his dad, with his
armor, on it, the two of them looking down at Carmen so proudly,
watching her deliver these stirring words.
Carmen says, ``My daughter Brittany speaks of the photograph.'' Then
she says, ``These treasures are a comfort to my children and a source
of pride, but more important, Gary's children can see and feel these
reminders of their father to keep him close. In much the same way, the
ship that we christen here today, the USNS Gordon, gives us faith that
Gary's spirit will go forward, his ideals and his beliefs honored by
those who know of him, and the life he so willingly gave.''
By the way, both the Medal of Honor winners were born in Lincoln;
Lincoln, Nebraska, a little town, the very soul of America, that is
Randy Shugert's birthplace; and Lincoln, Maine, where Gary's dad died a
few days ago.
``The very first time I laid eyes on Gary Gordon was the second month
of my 13th summer. I was staying with my grandparents in rural Maine,
Lincoln. Every week we made a trip into town for supplies. One hot
afternoon, in front of Newbury's department store,'' it is still there,
and I saw it, madam Speaker, just in November when I went up to look at
Gary's grave. By the way, there is a big monument at the end of the
street, filled with dozens of names, I counted them all and recorded it
for my record, from the Civil War, the War Between the States; a big
memorial for World War I, my father's war; an even more massive
memorial and placards in front of the little veterans' building for
World War II.
Unlike a lot of wealthy American cities, my hometown of Beverly Hills
has not one that I know of, certainly not a memorial; but killed in
action fighting for freedom for strangers in Laos and Cambodia and
Vietnam, dozens of names from this tiny little town, Lincoln, Maine. I
will bet it is the same in Lincoln, Nebraska, which I will visit some
day. There is that same Newbury store Carmen speaks of so movingly.
She says, ``there, in front of Newbury's department store, I saw a
boy washing windows. You never forget the first time that you see your
first love. I watched him as he worked, calm and purposeful and quiet.
Then he looked up at me, and I knew this was no ordinary boy. This boy
could win my heart. When he called my grandparents for permission to
take me out, he was turned down flat. `She is too young,' they told
him. And so in the way that I was to find out was uniquely Gary, he set
out to wait three years. Faithful and sparsely emotional letters about
his new life in the Army arrived regularly.
``On the day I turned 16, I sat in my grandparents' living room and
watched as his motorcycle pulled into the driveway, my palms sweaty on
my freshly ironed dress.''
You will recall when I read her beautiful letter to the editor of
Newsweek magazine, she mentioned another vehicle of Gary's, how he was
so proud of his red pickup down at Fort Bragg, where the Delta Force is
headquartered; and when he would come home after a hard day of training
he would pull into the driveway, and he and Ian, then 5, and Brittany,
then 3, would run out to hug their handsome daddy.
Here he is on a motorcycle in Carmen's driveway. ``A few hours of
talk, a quick first kiss in the rec room, and Gary left to go back to
his base many miles away. So began our slow dance of love, one that
would give us so much in so short a time. We had five summers and
winters together, the births of a son and daughter setting a rhythm to
such sweet time.
``On Sunday mornings when Ian was still so small, Gary would fill a
baby mug with watered down coffee, folding a section of the newspaper
to fit Ian's chubby hands, the two of them would sit together quietly,
turning the pages and sipping from their cups.''
I watched my wife do that with our grandkids. She calls it ``coffee
talk.''
``Gary's love for Brittany was just as strong. Every day when he
arrived home from work Brittany would run to meet him, his big hands
scooping her up and rubbing her bald head where baby hair had yet to
grow. We never knew when these times would be interrupted by a day that
brought Gary home with his head shaved, anticipation in his voice, and
a timetable for leaving.''
By the way, Madam Speaker, we never hear about the Delta Force
successes, or how many tragedies have been averted over the years,
terrorist tragedies, hostage takings that were thwarted before they
took place. All that must remain secret in Gary's unit in Fort Bragg
until some day, far in the future, 30, 40 years from now, when his
grandchildren will probably learn of his courage.
Carmen continues: ``I never worried when Gary left on a mission. As I
cheerfully kissed him good-bye and waved confidently from my front
porch, it never occurred to me to be afraid, because Gary was never
afraid. My safe world was shaken in December of 1989 with the invasion
of Panama and the realization that my husband was in the middle of the
fighting. Along with other young mothers clutching infants, I sat in a
darkened living room and watched television news around the clock. Gary
came back safely. One night when I told him of my fears, he laid a
gentle hand on my cheek and said quietly, `Carmen, don't worry about
things we can't change.'
[[Page H7519]]
``I know that death often leaves us with the haunting question: Why?
I know why Gary died. He died because he was true to his own code for
living, trying to help someone else. Fear would not have kept Gary from
doing what he needed to do, what he wanted to do, what he had prepared
all his life to do. There is rare strength in the creed he shared with
his comrades: I shall not fail those with whom I serve.''
Greater love than this no man has, Carmen.
``Gary lies buried a few miles from where I first saw him on that
sunny Maine morning. It is a spare and simple place, open to the
weather, bordered by woods that change with the seasons. He is not
alone now is that corner of the cemetery. His father, Dwayne, who died
suddenly of a heart attack last week, was laid to rest alongside his
son, not far from the papermill where Dwayne gave so many years of hard
work. A gentle, sometimes restless wind bends the flowers and stirs the
flags that are always there by Gary's military headstone,'' American
Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, ``below the chiseled words `Beloved
Husband and Father,' and the coin of his unit, the Delta Force coin,
and his beret etched into the 39-inch beautiful alabaster marble.
``I hope that some gentle wind will always guide this ship to sea,
and keep her on a safe, steady course. And when that wind strokes, the
cheeks of my children lying in their beds at night, and Ian and
Brittany ask me to tell them what course the USNS Gordon is striking
under the stars, I can tell them, she is on the same course their
father chose, headed for distant shores, answering the call of those in
need.''
Madam Speaker, a few years ago, September 1992 to be exact, when I
was explaining why America should never elect a draft-dodger to be the
Commander-in-Chief, I read a letter on this House floor of a young
college professor from a sister New England State of Maine, the State
of Rhode Island. His name was Sullivan Ballou. He was a major. He died
just a few miles from here, due west out toward Dulles Airport, at the
first Battle of Manassas, what the North called First Bull Run, or just
Bull Run, then.
The letter was to his wife, Sarah. It was so beautiful I could hardly
read it through. All of America became aware of it with the beautiful
National Institutes of Heritage, the NIH TV series of the Civil War.
When it was promoted on public broadcasting they would send to people
the onionskin reprint of Major Sullivan Ballou's last letter to his
wife, Sarah, and his two young boys. While Carmen was delivering here
beautiful christening eulogy to Sergeant Gary Gordon, I thought of
Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife.
He died at First Manassas, and that was the last treasure his wife
had of him. He talked about how dearly he wanted to see his two young
sons rise up to manhood. He said, ``But Sarah, I feel as though bound
by chains to those who fought for our independence,'' referring to the
Revolutionary War. ``I cannot break faith with them and the lives and
fortunes they gave up for our freedom. but I also feel so drawn to
you.''
And I do not know if Carmen Gordon has ever seen the exquisite letter
from Sullivan Ballou, or how he talked about ``some summer day, a cool
breeze will touch your cheek, and oh, Sarah, Sarah, know that as I.''
{time} 1545
I meant to have Sullivan Ballou's letter here today and put them both
in. So what I will do is put this again in the Record next week with
Sullivan Ballou's letter next to it so young Americans like Ian and
Brittany, and those a little older now, trying to decide what to do
with their lives, will learn that in this big, wealthy, exuberant,
wonderful country of ours, there are men--and now a lot of women--who
put on a blue uniform, a khaki uniform, a firefighter's rugged clothing
and give up their lives for us, and that there are people in the
Transportation Department, called the U.S. Coast Guard under the
Defense in wartime, they will die trying to rescue us in a hurricane
like Hurricane Bertha, working her way up the coast, and that in my
beloved Air Force, my dad's beloved Army--and he did love it--our
incomparable Navy and their soldiers at sea, our unparalleled in the
department of esprit and faithfulness, our U.S. Marine Corps, that
there are young men--and now women--all around this world, from Arctic
and Antarctic snows to still jungles, trying to feed people in
oppressive heat of God-forsaken nations in Africa. God does not forsake
anything. Forgive me that cliche term. And the 19 young men that died
in the Khobar Barracks bombing or the 19 that died with Gary Gordon, if
you include Sgt. Matt Rearson who was hit at the headquarters 3 days
after Gary died, had been flying rescue missions in for hours. I met a
helicopter pilot at the christening of the Gordon who flew 17\1/2\
hours nonstop. His wife came up to me proudly. She had seen me read the
Sullivan Ballou. I had flown a flag for everyone in their unit who had
been killed or injured on the roof of the Capitol. As a matter of fact,
on July 4, 1994, and Veterans Day, November 11, 1993, I flew over 200
flags for everybody wounded or killed in Somalia. I will probably do
the same next week for the 19 that died in Saudi Arabia.
Interesting. Nineteen killed in Khobar Barracks, 19 killed under
Urgent Fury trying to rescue Grenada, and 19 killed on October 3 and 4
and October 6 in the filthy alleys of Mogadishu.
So young Americans do not have to be dispirited by tragic votes like
the one that took place today, that cause a wonderful religious man
like Rev. Billy Graham to say, in that rotunda, on May 2, just a few
days before the commissioning of Medal of Honor winner Randy Shugart's
ship in San Diego, in that rotunda, and I bet there is not one-fifth,
one-tenth, one-twentieth of the people visiting with us in the gallery
that know Billy Graham said this, Madam Speaker, because the major
dominant liberal media culture blocked out his words. I happened to be
watching ABC that night. A silent clip of him. Did not project his
words across America. He said in this rotunda that this Nation is on
the brink of self-destruction. The United States of America, that we
love, is on the brink of self-destruction. No future for Ian or
Brittany Gordon, because of discussions like this one today on
sanctioning marriage for homosexuals. Unbelievable.
I hate to follow something so positive with something so negative,
but I had a hard time getting time to speak this week, Madam Speaker.
There are still mysteries around here in both parties that I am trying
to figure out. But here is a column from a man whom God put in a
wheelchair for the rest of his life with a civilian accident, brilliant
psychiatrist, sorry he does not agree with me on people serving in the
military with HIV, but you cannot get somebody to agree on everything
and I still have not written to him and made my case. But Charles
Krauthammer, handsome, vibrant, brilliant young student, I think at
Yale, when he jumped in a swimming pool, which cost my brother his two
front teeth and has cost a lot of people the rest of their lives in a
wheelchair, a tragic accident all too common. In that wheelchair, most
people who hear his brilliance, sitting in on Washington Week in Review
and guesting sometimes on Nightline and other Sunday shows, unless a
camera shot is very clear, you do not realize that his chair is a metal
chair for life.
Charles Krauthammer gave up the practice of psychiatry, I guess
temporarily, to be one of the better writers, one of the better sages,
or what we sometimes say, disdainfully, pundits or talking heads in
this country, and I want you to listen to this column.
Rush Limbaugh made reference to it the very same night that I told my
wife that afternoon, or she told me, read this on the House floor, and
unfortunately Rush Limbaugh only quoted a line from it. I think America
should hear this July 5, Washington Post column. I think everyone
should hear it.
Charles Krauthammer. A President for our time. The subheadline is a
quote from the article. ``A large number of Americans think their
President crooked and yet ethically fit for the office.''
``When the Gallup poll of June 18-19 asked whether the words ``honest
and trustworthy'' apply to Bill Clinton, Clinton lost 49 percent to 46.
Two weeks later in another national poll. same question, Clinton was
losing 54 to 40. And when Gallup asked whether Clinton had the honesty
and integrity
[[Page H7520]]
to serve as President, Clinton won 62 to 36, a landslide bigger than
Lyndon Johnson's 61'' or, I might add, Nixon's 60, with even more
people, a bigger plurality, more people voted in 1972 than in 1964.
``A milestone of sorts,'' Krauthammer says.
``A quarter century after Nixon, we have achieved the normalization
of Nixonian ethics. A large number of Americans think their President
crooked and yet ethically fit for the office.
``Whitewater gets worse. 49 to 42 think Clinton is not telling the
truth about it. 46 to 44 percent think he did something illegal.
Filegate grows. 50 to 36 percent think Clinton knew about it all along,
something he has explicitly denied. All the while Clinton rides high in
the polls with a strong 56 percent approval rating.''
Is that not his highest ever, Madam Speaker?
``This is no Teflon presidency. This is Velcro. Everything sticks to
this man. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Corbin Jones, Whitewater, Filegate,
et cetera, et cetera, but it does not matter. Expectations of
presidential character have fallen so low with Clinton that the people
believe the worst about him and still want him right where he is.''
``Republicans are at wits' end''--I admit it--``with frustration that
as the sordidness of this administration is progressively exposed,
Clinton suffers little political damage. The American people say--and
Perot's 19 percent claim it is a principle, 24 percent in California,
claim it is a principle--they want clean government, but they obviously
don't mean it.''
``They don't mean it about character, either. And the ultimate
Republican frustration is they don't mean it about policy, either.''
Again, I tell my fellow Americans, you bet I am frustrated. I thought
we were doing what you wanted us to do for a year and a half. I was not
in on the decisions to close down the government. I knew that would
backfire. Because I come out of the media. I won Emmys in my mid 30s. I
know more about broadcasting, radio and television, than any member of
my party and probably anybody on the other side. I knew how the media
would spin this, with Smokey the Bear camp guards at Yellowstone and
Yosemite, I predicted it, going to the little shops that sell beautiful
little redwood and sequoia curios and saying to them, ``What do you
think about this?''
The whole Medicare thing. I could smell it coming, how this would be
spun. You bet I am a frustrated Republican at the current polling. But
I am an optimist. It is not going to last for long.
``On policy with few expectations, abortion being the most notable.''
This is one where I disagree with Mr. Krauthammer. He looks at the
wrong polling. He is too smart, he should realize dirty-in/dirty-out.
You ask phony polling questions: ``Do you think a woman should have her
choice to her own reproductive freedom in a free country?'' Yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Do you think a baby should be three-quarters delivered, its entire
body out of the birth canal and scissors stuck into the base of its
skull and its little brain sucked out, do you think we should have
that? Clinton just signed off on that. They say, ``Oh no. That's up in
the air.''
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Greene of Utah). The gentleman will
suspend. The Chair needs to remind the gentleman that he must refrain
from referring to the President's personal character.
Mr. DORNAN. Well, let us see how rough Mr. Krauthammer gets here.
I want the Chair to be advised, I am against rule XVIII applying to
the executive branch. I am against Clinton and Gore getting the
protection and violating the separation of powers, but I will respect
it because we passed it here. But we did now know what we were passing
on. It was not debated. That is for the decorum of this Chamber or so
that this House naturally in combat, particularly in this current
conference period, do not say disparaging things about the U.S.
Senators in here, but I can tear the face off any Supreme Court
Justice, or Mrs. Clinton, which I have chosen not to do, or any of the
cabinet people who are running up $150,000 on travel cards flying all
around the world with huge staff and getting massages in exotic hotels,
I can tear up anybody except under rule XVIII in some strange flush of
generosity, we added those two offices. It was never respected with
George Bush, certainly Nixon was savaged in this well for most of his
career, Barry Goldwater as a U.S. Senator received some rough moments
here. But I will try and work my way through it and next year in
January try and take that out. Even if my friend Bob Dole is elected
President, I will try and take out that rule.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman's
difference of opinion. However, both the Chair and the Speaker are
constrained to follow the rules of the House as they have traditionally
been and are currently interpreted.
Mr. DORNAN. You bet we are. And I will begin to redact this
statement, because I think it does get tougher.
``On policy, with few exceptions, abortion being the most notable,
the country is conservative.'' Is that not a given? Even Ross Perot
agrees with that.
``The American people say they want smaller government, lower taxes,
balanced budgets, less welfare, more jails.''
That is what you all want up there in the gallery. We know that,
Madam Speaker. Anybody who visits in the gallery. Let me phrase that
correctly. I am not allowed to refer to you directly in the gallery.
Anybody who comes and joins us in the gallery, Madam Speaker, they know
that that is what they want.
I will say it again: Smaller government. Clinton said that standing
right up there at that beautiful lectern in front of you.
``Balanced budgets, less welfare, more jails. It is no accident that
no one campaigns for national office as a liberal.''
Not quite true, Charles. A lot of people over here, you can see it in
the vote today, 65 of them and the 1 independent. Well, the Republican
is a lame duck and about 5 of the Democrats are lame ducks, maybe 10.
So about 50 people are willing to go home and campaign that they are a
flaming liberal who wants homosexuals to have full marriage rights.
``Anyone who can get away with it campaigns as a conservative.
Clinton is campaigning as a conservative. Clinton is proving that
anyone with high intelligence--and blank blank--can get away with it.''
``Clinton, whose major presidential initiatives were gays in the
military''--Charles, that is an adjective. Homosexuals is a fine word
to use, Mr. Krauthammer--``homosexuals in the military, a stimulus
package of more Federal spending, a tax increase and the
nationalization of health care, now is running for reelection as a
moderate conservative.''
``In one of the most cynical and successful acts of election year
repositioning in recent American history, Clinton has moved to the
right on a dozen issues. He's for school uniforms and curfews for
minors. He's for the V-chip and for victims' rights. He's for the
constitutional amendment on victims' rights. He's for Megan's law, `to
not have sexual predators, way more than 50 percent of them homosexual,
being turned loose in a neighborhood.' ''
``He's against homosexual marriage. Having slashed the staff of the
White House Office of Drug Abuse by 80 percent''--this is all policy,
so this is OK, Madam Speaker--``by 80 percent, he's now talking tough
on crime. Having submitted a fiscal year 1997 budget with $200 billion
worth of deficits as far as the eye can see''--that is a Clintonian
quote--``he's now for a balanced budget.''
``Most brazen of all, having twice vetoed welfare reform bills, he's
now the champion of welfare reform. Three days before Bob Dole was to
give a major speech on welfare, Clinton suddenly announced in a
Saturday radio address his endorsement of Wisconsin's radical
Republican welfare plan.'' I do not think it is so radical.
``Clinton aides have since been hard at work watering down what he
said to co-opt Dole. No matter. That's for page 38, probably the B
section. The Saturday speech of Clinton's was page 1. Of course
everyone knows that Clinton, under the guidance of Dick Morris, is
merely positioning. But that doesn't matter.''
[[Page H7521]]
{time} 1600
The polls show that with these deliberate rhetorical moves to the
center, Clinton has risen significantly in the polls, 13 points on the
question of whether he reflects the values of the American people.
Reflect he does, like a mirror.
Now remember, these are Krauthammer's words. They are kind of
cynical. I do not know if I go along with this, but he sure made me
think. He says, ``He reflects you like a mirror. The Republicans are
confounded,'' yes. ``They were elected in 1994 on a detailed
conservative agenda that they then tried to enact an era of sincerity
and zeal for which they have been ever paying in the polls.''
Liberal networks taking these polls. Dirty in, dirty out.
Krauthammer continues, ``Clinton's political genius,'' that is a
compliment, ``is discerning and then becoming whatever the American
people want him to.''
``They want tough welfare reform, but they do not want to hurt
anyone. They want to abolish racial preferences, but they want to save
affirmative action. They want to balance the budget but will crucify
the politician who tampers with Medicare,'' which is busting the
budget.
In other words, Americans are not serious and neither is Clinton. On
every great issue they say yes and no, Clinton, the man that smoked but
did not inhale, lives and breathes, yes and no. He talks right and
governs when he can to the left. He talks tough and governs soft. He
is, in short, the perfect President for our time, and if he cuts a few
blank-blank ethical corners, so what?
Well, Madam Speaker, how much time do I have left on this rainy
hurricane Bertha Friday afternoon?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 15 minutes remaining.
Mr. DORNAN. First I would like to put in the Record as a follow-up to
my June 27 point of personal privilege letters from conservative groups
across this country. I have been around long enough that they are all
close friends. The incomparable, steady as she goes, Dr. James C.
Dobson, founder and president of Focus on the Family, on the homosexual
battle in our country.
I am not alone any longer, Madam Speaker, for my long-time friend of
20 years, Phyllis Schlafly, speaking for her great Eagle Forum, and she
is also the director of a coalition group to keep our pro-life values
in the Republican platform, she sends a beautiful letter.
Beverly LaHaye, great husband Tim LaHaye, good friend of mine.
Beverly LaHaye for the largest woman's organization in America,
Concerned Women for America, sends a letter of support.
The conscience on Capitol Hill from a small building over in the
northeast by Union Station. What a fighter, what a brave heart he has,
Paul M. Weyrich. He sends me a letter.
All five of these letters I want to put in, as there are about 10
more, and they are still coming in, that I want to put in next week.
One from Marc Morano of Electronic News Gathering, the reporter
thanking me for doing the expose on Jefferson's birthday,
interestingly, the same day we were commissioning one of those big
ships for Medal of Honor winner Randy Shugart, 2,000 wild partying
homosexuals, hundreds of them almost naked down here in our biggest,
most beautiful taxpayer-owned and operated auditorium, the Andrew
Mellon Auditorium, directly across the street from the actual star-
spangled banner. The 30 by 40 foot flag that flew up at Fort McHenry up
at Baltimore is on the north wall of the National Museum of American
History, and directly across the street is this homosexual Cherry
Jubilee. Unbelievable. He says I want to thank you for being the only
Member of Congress with the courage to come forward.
No, no, no, I am not the only one now, Mr. Morano. Marc Morano says
America needs new Bob Dornans. Well, at least on the vote today there
is 342 of us, including, that is, 118 Democrats. I am not alone on this
any longer.
This marriage thing was a defining moment, as my pal Cliff Stearns
from Florida called it today. He said my full uncensored report of the
Cherry Jubilee weekend will appear, I did not know this, in the July
1996 issue of Chronicles Magazine, Madam Speaker, a solid mainstream
Christian magazine under the title ``Sex, Drugs and the Republican
Party.'' Uh-oh. It will be available mid-month at newsstands or people
can call their 800-number.
In my reply to Representative Gunderson I left out one point, and I
did put Mr. Morano's reply in, I hope. Mr. Gunderson alleged that the
security guards were stationed in the bathroom throughout the night.
While it is true that guards periodically checked the bathrooms, they
were not there until the lights kept repeatedly going out. Just made a
correction.
I want to point out that I made my whole account of the Cherry
Jubilee available to every major news outlet immediately following the
so-called dance in April. I faxed CBS news, ABC news, UPI, the
Washington Post, USA Today and many others, but no one even looked into
it. If it were not for your efforts, courageous Armstrong Williams'
efforts and talk show hosts and all the media, that is Rush and all the
rest, this story would have faded away. Thank you for your efforts on
this issue. Thank you. God bless you.
Put that in the Record, too.
Electronic News Gathering,
McLean, VA, June 11, 1996.
Memorandum for Congressman Robert K. Dornan.
From: Marc Morano.
I want to personally thank you for being the only member of
Congress with the courage to come forth on the ``Cherry
Jubilee'' events. America needs more Bob Dornans! Thank you
for your eloquent defense of me and my reporting of the
event.
My full, uncensored report of the ``Cherry Jubilee''
weekend will appear in the July 96 issue of Chronicles
Magazine, under the title ``Sex, Drugs, & A Republican
Party.'' It will be available June 15 at newsstands or people
can call 800-877-5459 for a copy.
In my reply to Rep. Gunderson, I left out one point. Rep.
Gunderson alleged the security guards were stationed in the
bathroom throughout the night. While it is true that the
guards checked the bathrooms periodically, they were not
permanently stationed in there until the lights kept
repeatedly going out.
I also want to point out that I made my whole account of
the ``Cherry Jubilee'' available to every major news outlet
immediately following dance in April. I faxed CBS News, ABC
News, UPI, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today
and many others, but not one outlet even looked into it. If
it weren't for your efforts, Armstrong Williams, and the talk
radio medium, this whole story would have faded away.
Once again, thank you for your crusade on this issue. May
God bless you!
Sincerely,
Marc P. Morano.
____
Statement by James C. Dobson, Ph.D., Founder and President, Focus on
the Family
We feel strongly that as Christians, we are mandated to
love and care for people from all walks of life, even those
with whom we disagree or whose lifestyles we believe to be
immoral. Thus, Focus on the Family has no interest in
promoting ``hatred'' toward homosexuals or any other group of
our fellow human beings. We have not supported, and will
never support, legislation aimed at depriving gays and
lesbians of their constitutional rights--rights they share
with every citizen. More than that, we want to reach out to
homosexuals whenever and wherever we can.
However, we do strongly disagree with the efforts of
homosexual activists to redefine marriage and the family,
qualify for adoption, and promote homosexual practices in the
schools. We also oppose any attempts to equate a sexual
lifestyle with immutable characteristics such as race in
determining who is deserving of special legal protection.
We see no evidence that homosexuals as a class are
oppressed and powerless today. According to recent surveys,
the average homosexual earns $55,430 per year, compared to
$32,144 for heterosexuals. Homosexuals are not only well-
paid, but also highly educated: 59 percent of homosexuals
hold college degrees, compared to just 18 percent among all
Americans. If discrimination exists, it certainly doesn't
appear to operate in education or employment.
And when it comes to political clout, how can homosexuals
claim to be underrepresented? Virtually every political and
cultural objective of the gay and lesbian community is being
achieved today. Federal funding for AIDS research and
treatment is only one example: The Department of Health and
Human Services allocates 37 times more dollars per AIDS death
than it does per heart-disease death. This is true despite
the fact that heart disease kills more Americans than cancer,
tuberculosis, strokes, diabetes and AIDS combined.
Even more illustrative, homosexual activists have distorted
public-health law so that a woman who's been raped is not
permitted to know the HIV status of the man who raped her.
My point is that the homosexual community is hardly a
disadvantaged, powerless minority in need of special rights.
Instead, it is rapidly becoming a privileged class that
bitterly attacks those who dare criticize its political
objectives. Our opposition to that
[[Page H7522]]
community's political agenda is not an expression of hate
toward homosexual individuals, but one of social justice and
common sense.
Finally, homosexual promiscuity is a deadly practice,
shortening life and creating painful psychological problems.
We regret the political influences that would result in
vulnerable children being taught to perceive this deviant
behavior as just another equally healthy choice about one's
sexuality. The Bible teaches us that all sin leads to death,
and homosexuality, like heterosexual promiscuity, is an
abomination in the eyes of God.
____
Eagle Forum,
Washington, DC.
Dear Bob: As you prepare to respond to Representative Steve
Gunderson's remarks through a point of personal privilege, I
want to share with you several verses from the book of
Ezekiel that I hope will give you encouragement and peace.
``The word of the Lord came to me: `Son of man, speak to
your countrymen and say to them. When I bring the sword
against a land, and the people of the land choose one of
their men and make him their watchman, and he sees the sword
coming against the land and blows the trumpet to warn the
people, then if anyone hears the trumpet but does not take
warning and the sword comes and takes his life, his blood
will be on his own head * * * If he had taken warning, he
should have saved himself. But if the watchman sees the sword
coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and
the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man
will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the
watchman accountable for his blood.
``Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of
Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from
me. When I say to the wicked, `O wicked man, you will surely
die,' and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways,
that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you
accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man
to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for
his sin, but you will have saved yourself.
``Say to them, `As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign
Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but
rather than they turn from their ways and live.''--Ezekiel
33:1-11.
Bob, thank you for your commitment to the truth and your
willingness to stand up for what is right. You are a real
American hero!
Faithfully,
Phyllis Schlafly.
____
Concerned Women for America,
Washington, DC, May 29, 1996.
Hon. Robert Dornan,
Longworth House Office Building, House of Representatives,
Washington, DC.
Dear Congressman Dornan: The 600,000 members of Concerned
Women for America want to thank you for your unfailing
determination and leadership in protecting the traditional
family against the assault of the homosexual agenda.
Over the last decade, we have see homosexual activism flood
into mainstream society. No longer are homosexuals satisfied
with a ``live and let live'' philosophy. They want society to
endorse and encourage their behavior--a behavior most
Americans deem immoral.
A recent Wirthlin poll, commissioned by CWA, found that 66
percent of American women believe it's important for
government officials to promote traditional family values
over tolerance for ``alternative lifestyles.''
Ignoring what America wants, homosexual activists have
pushed their agenda into our schools, our media, and our
public policy. Sanctioned by the National Education
Association, now many sex education classes include segments
that portray homosexuality as a perfectly healthy, normal
lifestyle. And mainstream TV sitcoms reinforce this view.
Gay activists call this ``progress.'' But such ``progress''
takes a heavy toll on America's youth. One former homosexual,
Michael Johnson, explained the effect it had on him. ``One of
the things that had an impact on me is those in our society
who would tell me it's okay to be [homosexual],'' he said.
And what that did to me as a young person struggling with the
issue was not only to confuse me, but also to ultimately lead
me to pursue the desires that God would have me reject.''
Although Mr. Johnson has left the gay lifestyle and now runs
an ex-gay ministry in Alaska, his years living as a
homosexual have quite literally cost him his life. He has
been diagnosed HIV positive.
America's youth deserve better than this, and they
certainly deserve a better model than a congressional defense
of the outrageous behavior that took place at the Cherry
Jubilee. I urge you to keep fighting the good fight for the
sake of the next generation.
Sincerely,
Beverly LaHaye,
Chairman.
____
Paul M. Weyrich,
Washington, DC, May 23, 1996.
Congressman Bob Dornan,
Longworth House Office Building,
Washington, DC.
Dear Bob: I want to commend you for having the courage to
stand to answer Congressman Steve Gunderson.
It has never been my view that it is our business what
lifestyles people privately choose. That is between
themselves and God.
But when individuals, especially elected officials, insist
that their lifestyles be validated by society that is where I
draw the line.
That Rep. Gunderson, who openly flaunts his homosexuality,
would lend his name and office to any event where there is
immoral behavior is outrageous. That Gunderson would be
supported in this endeavor by elements of the Republican
party is reprehensible.
When any society through its leadership gives its stamp of
approval to actions which are biblically condemned, it has
started down the road to perdition.
No so called good intentions (i.e. raising money for AIDS)
can mask the blatant attempt by those in leadership positions
who seek an imprimatur for their immoral behavior.
I stand with you as you call the nation's attention to
actions which are self destructive.
You know well you will be condemned by those who condone
immorality for what you do. So much the greater your eternal
reward will be for standing with the truth.
Sincerely,
Paul Weyrich.
____
Remarks by Mrs. Carmen Gordon at the Naming Ceremony for USNS
``Gordon'', July 4, 1996
Thank you for that kind introduction and the opportunity to
be here with you today.
I'd like to tell you about Gary.
Just behind a small door in his bedroom closet, my son Ian
has stored the treasures dearest to him. The uniforms his
father wore, the canteens he drank from, the hammock he slung
in so many corners of the world, are there. The boots that
took his dad through desert and jungle now lace up around
Ian's small ankles. They are all piled neatly together by a
little boy's hands and sought out during quiet times.
My daughter Brittany keeps a photograph of her daddy next
to her small white bed, the big 8 by 10 of him smiling
straight through to her. It is the first thing she packs when
leaving home, and the first thing she unpacks when she
arrives anywhere.
There are comfort to my children. And a source of pride.
But most important, Gary's children can see and feel these
reminders of their father to keep him close.
In much the same way, the ship that we christen here
today--the USNS Gordon--gives us faith that Gary's spirit
will go forward, his ideals and his beliefs honored by those
who know of him and the life he so willingly gave.
The very first time I laid eyes on Gary Gordon was the
second month of my thirteenth summer. I was staying with my
grandparents in rural Maine. Every week we made a trip into
town for supplies. One hot afternoon in front of Newberry's
Department store, I saw a boy washing windows. You never
forget the first time that you see your first love. I watched
him as he worked, calm and purposeful and quiet. Then he
looked at me, and I knew this was no ordinary boy. This boy
could win my heart.
When he called my grandparents for permission to take me
out, he was turned down flat. She's too young, they told him.
And so, in the way that I was to find out was uniquely Gary,
he set out to wait three years. Faithful and sparsely
emotional letters about his new life in the Army arrived
regularly. On the day I turned 16, I sat in my grandparents'
living room and watched as his motorcycle pulled into the
driveway, my palms sweaty on my freshly ironed dress. A few
hours of talk, a quick first kiss in the rec room, and Gary
left to be back at his base, miles away. So began our slow
dance of love, one that would give us so much in so short a
time.
We had five summers and winters together, the births of a
son and daughter setting a rhythm to such sweet time. On
Sunday mornings when Ian was still so small, Gary would fill
a baby mug with watered down coffee. Folding a section of the
newspaper to fit Ian's chubby hands, the two of them would
sit together quietly, turning the pages and sipping from
their cups. Gary's love for Brittany was just as strong,
Every day when he arrived home from work, Brittany would
run to meet him, his big hands scooping her up and rubbing
her bald head where baby hair had yet to grow. We never
knew when these times would be interrupted by a day that
brought Gary home with his head shaved, anticipation in
his voice and a timetable for leaving.
I never worried when Gary left on a mission. As I
cheerfully kissed him goodbye and waved confidently from our
front porch, it never occurred to me to be afraid. Because
Gary was never afraid. My safe world was shaken in December
of 1989 with the invasion of Panama and the realization that
my husband was in the middle of it. Along with other young
mothers clutching infants, I sat in a darkened living room
and watched television news around the clock. Gary came back,
safe. One night when I told him of my fears, he laid a gentle
hand on my cheek and said quietly, ``Carmen don't worry about
things we can't change.''
I know that death often leaves us with the haunting
question ``Why?'' I know why Gary died. He died because he
was true to his own code for living--trying to help someone
else. Fear would have kept Gary from doing what he needed to
do, what he wanted to do, what
[[Page H7523]]
he had prepared all his life to do. There is rare strength in
the creed he shared with his comrades: ``I shall not fail
those with whom I serve.''
Gary lies buried only a few miles from where I first saw
him on that sunny Maine morning. It is a spare and simple
place, open to the weather and bordered by woods that change
with the seasons. He is not alone now in that corner of the
cemetery. His father Duane, who died suddenly of a heart
attack last week, was laid to rest alongside his son, not far
from the paper mill where he gave so many years of hard work.
A gentle, sometimes restless wind bends the flowers and
stirs the flags that are always there on Gary's military
headstone, below the chiseled words ``Beloved Husband and
Father,'' and the coin of his unit pressed into white stone.
I hope that same gentle wind will always guide this ship to
sea and keep her on a safe and steady course.
And when that wind strokes the cheeks of my children lying
in their beds at night, and Ian and Brittany ask me to tell
them what course the USNS Gordon is striking under the stars,
I can tell them that she is on the same course their father
chose: Headed for distant shores, answering the call of those
in need.
____
[From the Washington Post, July 5, 1996]
A President for Our Time
(By Charles Krauthammer)
When the Gallup Poll (June 18-19) asked whether the words
``honest and trustworthy'' apply to Bill Clinton, Clinton
lost 49 percent to 46 percent. (Two weeks later in another
poll, same question, Clinton was losing 54-40.) And when
Gallup asked whether Clinton has the honesty and integrity to
serve as president, Clinton won 62-36, a landslide bigger
than Lyndon Johnson's.
Expectations of presidential character have fallen so low
with Clinton that the people can believe the worst about him
and still want him where he is.
Republicans are at wits' end with frustration that, as the
sordidness of this administration is progressively exposed,
Clinton suffers little political damage. The American people
say--and Perot's 19 percent claim it is a principle--they
want clean government, but they obviously don't mean it.
They don't mean it about character. And--the ultimate
Republican frustration--they don't mean it about policy
either.
On policy, with few exceptions (abortion being the most
notable), the country is conservative. The American people
say they want smaller government, lower taxes, balanced
budgets, less welfare, more jails, etc. It is no accident
that no one campaigns for national office as a liberal.
Anyone who can get away with it campaigns as a conservative.
And Clinton is proving that anyone with high intelligence and
no scruples can get away with it.
Clinton, whose major presidential initiatives were gays in
the military, a stimulus package of federal spending, a tax
increase and the nationalization of health care, now is
running for reelection as a moderate conservative.
In one of the most cynical--and successful--acts of
election-year repositioning in recent American history,
Clinton has moved to the right on a dozen issues. He's for
school uniforms and curfews for minors. He's for the V-
chip and the ``victims rights'' constitutional amendment.
He's for Megan's Law; He's against gay marriage.
Having slashed the staff of the White House Office of Drug
Abuse by 80 percent, he's now talking tough on drugs. Having
submitted a FY '97 budget with $200 billion deficits as far
as the eye can see, he's now for a balanced budget.
Most brazen of all, having twice vetoed welfare reform
bills, he's now the champion of welfare reform. Three days
before Bob Dole was to give a major speech on welfare,
Clinton suddenly announced in a Saturday radio address his
endorsement of Wisconsin's radical (Republican) welfare plan.
Clinton's aides have since been hard at work watering it
down. No matter. That's for page 38. The Saturday speech was
page 1.
Of course, everyone knows that Clinton, under the guidance
of Dick Morris, is merely positioning. But that too doesn't
matter. The polls show that with these deliberate rhetorical
moves to the center. Clinton has risen significantly in the
polls--13 points--on the question of whether he reflects the
values of the American people.
Reflect he does. Like a mirror. The Republicans are
confounded. They were elected in 1994 on a detailed
conservative agenda that they then tried to enact--an error
of sincerity and zeal for which they have ever been paying in
the polls.
Clinton's political genius is discerning and then becoming
whatever the American people want. They want tough welfare
reform, but they don't want to hurt anyone. They want to
abolish racial preferences, but they want to save affirmative
action. They want to balance the budget, but will crucify the
politician who tamper with Medicare--which is busting the
budget.
In other words, they are not serious and neither is
Clinton. On every great issue, they say yes and no. Clinton,
the man who smoked but didn't inhale, lives and breathes yes
and no.
He talks right and governs (when he can) left. He talks
tough and governs soft. He is, in short, the perfect
president for our time. And if he cuts a few ethical corners
too, so what?
Mr. DORNAN. Now, what I did not have time to get to--I feel like
taking my coat off and throwing it across the table--what we did get to
take, thanks to a former U.S. attorney from Georgia, Bob Barr bringing
this on the floor, is this letter from Lambda Legal Defense. I would
recommend Lambda Report, which is a Judeo-Christian ethical report on
Lambda stuff. I want to read again to set the scene here. The key line
highlighted in red on why we debated so long Hawaii's attempt and
Hawaii is not far, thousands of miles away. That is only physically. I
guess if Virginia across the Potomac were doing what Hawaii is doing or
Maryland surrounding the district on three sides, then it would have
been a different debate. But oh, let Hawaii do their vacation things
and have all these homosexual marriages.
But listen to this again from the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and I
have debated them on Crossfire: ``Many same-sex couples in and out of
Hawaii are going to take advantage of what would be a landmark victory.
The great majority of those who travel to Hawaii to marry will return
to their homes in the rest of the 50 States expecting full legal
recognition of their unions,'' and they will darn well try and get
legal services, tax dollars, your tax dollars through a corporation we
should have shut down, to make you pay for their battles back in these
States to make the other 49 recognize their so-called Hawaiian
marriage.
Now, remember, it only passed 342 to 67, 2 present, 23 absent. But
what is it going to do in the other Chamber, in the other body? That is
anybody's guess, given the difference in our defense authorization
bill.
I am for ethically asking young recruits, ``Are you a homosexual?''
They will not hear of it. I am for taking the almost 1,000 people, that
is a regiment, who have the AIDS virus and are on, we hope, a slow, not
a fast path to death, that are lucky to be Americans and have access to
the greatest medical system in the world that has not been destroyed
yet, and I want to give them over to the VA so that other people do not
have to deploy over and over unfairly because these people broke the
UCMJ, with the exception of two cases that are wives, military wives,
who her philandering husband contaminated like they would bring TB
home.
They want to restore abortion to military hospitals. That is a
contested item between the conferences. Lots of issues. We do not know
what is going to happen over there for sure.
Let me tell Members what I did not get to in my point of personal
privilege. I entered in the Record, but I did not show it. Madam
Speaker, you see this thick magazine as big as a Reader's Digest, as
large in pages and billing bigger in size? Hard core pornography in it,
too. I did not realize that. All I looked at was the camera, the
thickness. It is called Steam.
It is available around this country to tell homosexuals where to have
sex with strangers in public parks. Where to go in our national parks,
where to go in your city parks, and there is a European version. Steam
did not come up in the debate today, nor did this from the Advocate
magazine, which used to be a newspaper. It is now the main homosexual
magazine in America. It is all pornographic classified ads to get
people to go to leather bars and engage in bondage, discipline, things
that I cannot mention on the House floor, sadism, sodomy, masochism,
things involving craziness, I mean real craziness. This is their
classifieds that they have now spun off from the main magazine, so they
can do their first interview with President Clinton. Of course, he lets
them down. He does not interview with them face-to-face. He mailed in
his answers.
But the current Advocate magazine has a Clinton interview, the
President of the United States, bragging about he has done more for
homosexuality than all of the 41 preceding Presidents, from Washington
to George Bush, all wrapped together. Nobody is arguing that, but he is
going to back up the vote of the Republicans and 118 Democrats today
who voted, if the Senate goes along with it, for no homosexual
marriages having to be recognized in the other 49 States if Hawaii goes
ballistic.
In the classifieds here, which they spun off so they could do these
mainstream interviews--I am sorry, I am just sorry. This is like a
visit to Dante's Inferno. I would recommend
[[Page H7524]]
kids in high school read his Inferno, read Milton's Paradise Lost and
avoid this defilement that is mentioned both in Romans and the New
Testament and in Leviticus, which was ridiculed and attacked today in
the face of Moses up here. I hope guests when they come here always
recognize the 23 lawgivers here, some of them without such sterling
characters, like Napoleon, but he was a good lawmaker, that they are
all profiled except one, Moses' direct face looking right down on us,
the man of Exodus.
When you attack Leviticus, you attack the Torah. The Torah is the
first five books. It is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
Deuteronomy. That is the basic thing that so many people died to hide
at the height of the terror of Nazi Germany, was to protect and hide
the Torah.
Now look at this. I predicted on the floor today, Madam Speaker, that
we would be arguing about pedophilia on this floor in 2 or 3 years.
Here is a book, a new book with an in-your-face title. Look at this,
Mr. Speaker. Corruption. It is all about youth, teenagers, pedophilia.
That is what it is all about. Sickening stuff.
I have got a 14-year-old grandson. He is tough. He watches
television. He is a good student, an ``A'' student, gateway program
student, as is his younger sister. She just flew out alone to L.A. and
had great adult conversations on the plane going out to Los Angeles,
her first big trip on her own, 14, a soccer star, also an A plus
student as is the younger sister. It looks like hopefully I have raised
good kids that are such conscientious parents. All my grandkids are
just working so hard, the television is monitored, they understand and
love history, a lot, thank heavens, their grandfather has been able to
pass on some of my love for this country. I would not show these bright
oldest of my 10 grandkids. I am counting one before it has arrived
around Christmastime. But of my five granddaughters and grandsons, this
is not for their eyes, but it is out there and that is why we are going
to discuss pedophilia and I am going to amend what I said during the
debate today. It is not going to be in 3 years. We are going to be
debating pedophilia, Mr. Speaker, on this floor in the spring and do
you know why? Because the Internet and that Supreme Court is in our
face saying that child molesters can make contact and, get this, fine
tuning, make contact with young males. If a child molester is on the
Internet making contact with a young girl, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, and
he is found out, does anybody suggest the young girl who is a
heterosexual is going to commit suicide if she continues her dialogue
with this guy or if it is broken off? I mean she will commit suicide?
Of course not. This guy should be busted and the young girl should be
told to go back to her homework and, if she has abusive or neglectful
parents, make it some way the States, not the Federal Government, can
address that problem.
But get this, and I am going to ask unanimous consent to put it in
the Record, here in my--at the beginning of my point of personal
privilege, here is the excellent new conservative magazine that I held
up called the Weekly Standard, started by a good conservative Fred
Barnes and Bill Crystal, Irving Crystal's great son. Here is the cover
issue, Pedophilia Chic. I held it up on the floor. Unfortunately, the
camera, I held it out so far it cut my arm off and no one ever did see
the title. By the time I brought it back to the lectern, it was down.
Pedophilia Chic is a terrifying article. Get the Record of today, not
through my office, please, through your own Congressman, I would ask
people watching us today, Madam Speaker, and read this article by a
lady, Mary Everstat. She brings out that the New Republic and then the
New York Times have been running articles inching toward pedophilia.
Here is a guy with an unusual name, sounds like a contract player at
MGM in the bad old days. Trip Gabriel, T-r-i-p. Trip Gabriel writes in
a front-page report in the New York Times that ``Some on-live
discoveries give gay youths a path to themselves.''
{time} 1615
They are on the verge of suicide. So if a child molester is making
contact with a male child in a homosexual way, if we break that
connection and bust the molester, the young male child threatens to
commit suicides.
I will say it again. The heterosexual young lady, and there is no
heterosexual young men being contacted by women. There are no women
predators to speak of. The number is infinitesimally small or
nonexistent. There is no lesbian, no heterosexual woman who prays on
children. We cannot even find statistical data.
This is basically a male homosexual problem, and the child molesters
of the heterosexual variety are usually drunken disgusting stepfathers
who are dismissing their wife and going after her daughter from another
marriage. Take out that chunk and take out the numbers and prorate
these cohorts, since there is only about three-quarters of a percent of
lesbians in the country and 1 percent male homosexuals, and the rate of
male pedophilia, homosexual pedophilia on makes is 11 to 1 over
heterosexual pedophiles.
This article is terrifying because it says it is chic, it is in vogue
to slowly inch our way toward saying, well, what are we going to do, we
have to teach homosexuality in a positive way for our high schools or
these young emerging people will commit suicide.
I received a letter today from a Member's male significant other, who
has a spouse pin and a wife I.D. card. There are three of them in this
House, two on that side and one on this side. In this debate today, if
we won, and we won big, 342 to 67, the leadership promised me, and that
is the Republican leadership, that they are going to ask back for the
wife pin.
This is the First Armored Division. That is not a wife pin, folks.
The wife pin, the spouse pin and their I.D. card, since this bill is
passed, I will make sure that happens.
Pedophilia is going to be debated in the spring, and it is sad, just
like everybody was shocked today.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include for the Record the
full article from the Weekly Standard. And these other letters I
already have permission. Thank you, and have a great weekend.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Without objection, the gentleman may submit
those materials and extraneous other documents for the Record which are
consistent with House rules and procedures.
There was no objection.
The material referred to is as follows:
Pedophilia Chic
(By Mary Eberstadt)
When most Americans hear the word ``pedophile,'' they
usually think of men like the self-described ``child-
molesting demon'' Larry Don McQuay, who was released from a
prison in East Texas in April and driven to San Antonio to
begin a closely supervised, but nonetheless semi-free, new
life. And when most Americans think of men like McQuay
roaming the streets, they react much as did the outraged,
screaming-in-the-streets, placard-carrying citizens of San
Antonio. About the mildest thing said by one of them was ``I
sure hope there will be more indictments'' to send McQuay
back to jail--this, from the chairman of the State Board of
Pardons and Paroles, under whose auspices McQuay was
released. The local victims-rights groups were less
restrained. As the president of one such group put it, in a
straddle between threat and hope, ``In this city, he's not
going to be safe''--thus summarizing neatly the vigilante
desire that most parents, when contemplating a figure like
McQuay, would doubtless second.
In addition to a spate of high-profile cases like McQuay's,
the past few years have also witnessed an ongoing public
obsession with child abuse in any form; a Congress that, at
the urging of the White House and Justice Department, has
toughened the penalties for child-pornography trafficking;
and Bill Clinton's signing of the constitutionally
complicated Megan's Law, which makes it impossible for those
once convicted of child-sex offenses to move anonymously
into an unsuspecting neighborhood.
And yet a funny thing happened on the way to today's
intense fear and loathing of Chester the Molester. For even
as citizens around the country have sought new ways of
keeping the McQuays of the world cordoned off from the rest
of us, and even as the public rhetoric about protecting
America's children has reached deafening levels, a number of
enlightened voices have been raised in defense of giving
pedophilia itself a second look.
After all--or so some of these voices have suggested--what
if pedophilia is in fact a victim-less crime? What if
teenagers, and even children, are more in control of their
emotions, their bodies, their sexuality, than the rest of us
think? What if sexual relations with adults are actually
``empowering'' to the young? What if pedophilies and would-be
pedophiles are in fact victims themselves--exploited by the
cunning young people they befriend?
[[Page H7525]]
There are also the matters of civil liberty. Is it fair to
send people to jail for owning, trading, and obsessively
consuming child pornography when no one is really injured by
such practices? And what about the notion of an ``age of
consent''--isn't it an anchronism, in this age of adolescent
sexual precocity? Shouldn't it be lowered to a more realistic
standard? Say, to fourteen? Thirteen? Twelve?
Once upon a time, the reader losing sleep over questions
like these would have had to travel to Times Square, or the
local porn shop, or perhaps the nearest branch of the North
American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). But no longer.
Now he need only subscribe to the right stylish magazines,
the right cutting-edge publishers, and be familiar with the
work of the right celebrated authors. It is hard to know what
to make of these piecemeal attempts--which amount to nothing
so elevated as a movement--to rewrite what most of the rest
of us persist in thinking about adults whose sexual interests
run to kids. Call it the last gasp of a nihilism that has
exhausted itself by chasing down every other avenue of
liberation, only to find one last roadblock still manned by
the bourgeoisie. Call it pedophilia chic.
calvin klein's leather daddy
For laymen, the best-known example of this phenomenon was
last summer's much-reviled and ultimately abandoned ad
campaign for Calvin Klein jeans. In fact, as the record will
show, when measured against other recent soundings on the
subject of adult-child sex, that ad campaign itself appears--
pun intended--mere child's play. But first, a review of the
facts.
Just about a year ago, the company launched a series of
print and television ads that were, according to almost every
critic who reviewed them, bizarrely and upsettingly
reminiscent of child pornography. Even for a public made
blase by exposure to Calvin Klein's many other provocative
images, the seediness of this latest effort proved just too
much. There were, first, the images themselves: teenage
models--most looking bored, with legs spread apart and
underwear revealed--lounging around semi-dressed. There was
also the matter of setting. The cheap wood paneling and shag
carpets were supposed to suggest a suburban rec room--another
visual convention, it seems, of the child-porn genre.
By common consent, the scripts for the TV ads--which ran
only in New York before being withdrawn--were even more
compelling evidence of the campaign's indebtedness to the
pornographic canon. In those ads, an offstage male voice
seemed to goad the young models into responding through a
combination of wiles and special pleading. ``You take
direction well--do you like to take direction?'' the voice
asked a girl. The lines to boys were smuttier still. ``You
got a real nice look. How old are you? Are you strong? You
think you could rip that shirt off of you? That's a real
nice body. You work out? I can tell.'' And so on.
Though girls and boys alike appeared in the ads, it was
clear to any savvy viewer that the boys, rather than the
girls, were the main event. For one thing, there was nothing
really new about the girls. As a critic for Adweek remarked
at the time, ``Girls have been objectified forever. It's not
shocking, sad to say.'' (It is particularly unshocking in a
Calvin Klein jeans campaign; after all, it is now fifteen
years since an underage Brooke Shields was used to suggestive
effect.)
No, what was new in this latest effort was the question of
who those boys were posing for. As James Kaplan noted acidly
in New York magazine, ``What especially got to many people
was the images of the boys, scrawny and white-chested, posing
like pin-ups, their cK Clavin Klein jeans partially undone. .
. . That was really groundbreaking advertising.''
The talent, too, was cutting edge. The ad campaign was shot
by the well-known photographer Steven Meisel (who is
credited, among other work, with the photos in Madonna's Sex
book). Meisel in turn made another personnel choice of
celebrity interest. As the Washington Post reported later in
September.
When President Clinton railed against those notorious
Calvin Klein ads . . . he probably didn't know that the off-
camera voice in the television versions belonged to a
gentleman named Lou Maletta--aka the Leather Daddy. Since
Calvin Klein proclaimed loudly in his defense that there was
no pornographic intent to the ads, Maletta was certainly an
interesting casting
choice. . . .
Lou Maletta, 58, is founder and president of the New York-
based Gay Cable Network, which produces ``Gay USA,'' a news
show; ``In the Dungeon,'' ``about the New York leather
scene''; and ``Men & Films,'' which features excerpts from
gay porn videos, and for which Maletta's Leather Daddy
character was created.
The next day, the Post was forced to publish a correction:
At the last minute, and for reasons unclear, Klein himself
decided to replace ``Leather Daddy'' with a professional
voice-over actor. Interesting though that decision may be--at
the very least, it does seem to imply an awareness on
someone's part that there was such a thing as going too far--
it is not nearly as significant a choice as that of
commissioning Maletta in the first place. What that choice
signified was what any sophisticated viewer would already
have discerned--that the ads had an obvious man-boy sexual
subtext.
The second interesting fact about the outcome of the Klein
affair was the inadvertently revealing rationale put forth by
company officials. The main idea seemed to be that teenagers
are more sexually sophisticated than many adults want to
believe. ``The message of the cK Calvin Klein jeans current
advertising campaign,'' as a full-page ad in the New York
Times and elsewhere informed the public, was that ``young
people today, the most media savvy generation yet, have a
real strength of character and independence. They have very
strongly defined lines of what they will and will not do . .
.'' It was this very strength, officials reiterated, that
proved discomfiting to the public at large. ``The world,'' as
Klein himself told an interviewer shortly after the ads were
pulled, ``is seeing a reflection of what's really going on.''
In a sense, Calvin Klein got it exactly right. All that
groundbreaking advertising was indeed reflecting something
real, albeit something very different from what the expost-
facto explanations claimed. What those ads did mirror was
something else: the idea that non-adults (particularly if
they are boys) are appropriate sex objects for adults
(particularly if the are men).
Contrary to what some critics implied at the time, Calvin
Klein and his team did not invent the idea of using man-boy
sex to grab public attention; they merely submitted it to a
commercial plebiscite. Middle America, to the surprise of the
fashion moguls, voted the campaign down. But Middle America
has only been one testing ground for revisionist suggestions
about pedophilia. Other, more sophisticated venues have
proved more willing to give the subject a second look.
`a step in the right direction'
Consider an example from the New York Times, which, in an
errie conjunction, appeared within weeks of the Calvin Klein
ad blitz. At the time, as readers may recall, the public fear
of pedophile predators was being fanned by the discovery
of yet another form of outreach: the home computer. In the
preceding months, one 16-year-old boy had run away with
bus tickets provided by a chat-line ``friend''; similar
cases of solicitation had become the subjects of FBI
investigations; and Congress, heavily pressured by
interest groups, had turned its hand to devising
legislation that would prevent the exploitation of minors
via cyberspace. All in all, it seemed an unlikely moment
to suggest that those selfsame chat rooms and bulletin
boards had their bright side. But that is exactly what the
N.Y. Times managed to do in a front-page report by Trip
Gabriel called ``Some On-Line Discoveries Give Gay Youths
a Path to Themselves.''
Though ``a handful of high-profile cases'' had ``dramatized
the threat of on-line predators,'' wrote Gabriel, kids
themselves shared no such fears of the screen. In fact, ``all
the young users interviewed'' for the Times piece ``said the
threat was exaggerated, adding that they would not be likely
to meet blindly with an on-line acquaintance.'' In fact, if
the kids had any fear at all, it seemed to be quite the
opposite--that their lines of communication would be shut
down by party-pooping parents and legislators. Recent
legislation, in particular, this reporter discovered, ``has
made some `gay youths' fearful about the future of on-line
discussions.''
And fearful they should be, if cyberspace is really the
lifeline the Times made it out to be. A ``distraught youth''
in California was ``on the verge of suicide'' until reaching
one ``Daniel Cox, 19, a regular on an Internet chat channel
dedicated to gay teenagers'' at 3 a.m. Cox ministered to the
California youth, and the next day ``the young man was back
on line and doing O.K., Mr. Cox said [emphasis added].'' This
apparently happens all the time. As another of these selfless
do-gooders put it--one Michael Handler, ``17, a moderator of
the Usenet news group for gay youth''--``We want everybody to
be who they are and be happy and not kill themselves because
they feel they're some sort of abomination.''
Another teenager, Ryan Matsuno, ``typed out a plaint of
loneliness'' one night, only to receive ``more than 100
supportive E-mail letters'' within the next few days--letters
that ``gave me courage'' and ``the initiative to go through
with telling my mother,'' according to Master Matsuno. Still
another teenager, we are told, used his computer skills to
outwit that rarest of things in cyberspace, an actual
predator: ``Dan Martin, a gay 17-year-old in Fresno, Calif.,
said he talked for a year on line to a man claiming to be 21.
Occasionally the conversation turned to sex. When Mr. Martin
suggested a meeting, the man refused and confirmed Mr.
Martin's suspicions that he was really middle-aged. `After I
confronted him, I never heard from him again,' Mr. Martin
said.''
In sum, according to Gabriel, ``sites for gay and lesbian
youth are the source of some of the most stirring stories in
cyberspace.''
These touching dramas, the Times report continued, are
social-worker approved--certainly by one Frances Kunreuther,
director of ``a social service agency for gay teenagers in
Manhattan,'' who says, ``I think the Internet is a step in
the right direction.'' At the same time, though, the social
workers also ``cautioned that cyberspace could not substitute
for face-to-face contacts.'' But wait: Aren't face-to-face
contracts exactly what most people fear when they think of
kids in sex-saturated ``chat rooms''? Well, no matter. And no
matter too, apparently, that anyone logging on as a teenager
could be 17, or 70--or 7. The only thing that matters, or
[[Page H7526]]
so it appears from reporter Gabriel, is that ``the electronic
curtain is not a closet''--this, from one Reid Fishler,
founder of an Internet site called the ``Youth Assistance
Organization,'' who is said to be 19.
``A danger to his students, or only to himself?''
Another place willing to ask some hard-nosed questions
about grownups who are sexually interested in kids is Vanity
Fair magazine. For the most part, its glossy pages seem an
unlikely territory on which to argue in earnest about
anything--much less about anything as obscure as whether a
high school teacher obsessed with child pornography was in
fact a misunderstood victim himself. Nonetheless, it was in a
1992 issue of Vanity Fair that veteran reporter Jesse
Kornbluth published what is probably the most heartfelt and
sympathetic portrayal of a convicted child-pornography
trafficker yet to appear in expensive print.
``Exeter's Passion Play,'' as the piece was called,
concerned the fate of Larry Lane (or ``Lane'') Bateman, a
tenured teacher at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy who was
convicted in October 1992 of possessing and transporting
child pornography. The preceding summer, a police raid on his
apartment had turned up 33 videotapes of child pornography.
The police also found hundreds of pornographic tapes
featuring adults--that is to say, men--and still other tapes
made by Exeter students on assignment from Bateman that their
teacher had spliced and doctored to his liking (for example,
zeroing in on genital areas). Finally, the police also found
sophisticated videotaping equipment, some of which belonged
to Exeter, later valued at between $200,000 and $250,000.
As Bateman would later admit to the authorities, he had
been involved with child pornography for twenty years--buying
it, lending it, going out of his way to get it, and above
all, viewing it obsessively. Moreover, at least some of the
people in his life were aware that he was deeply involved in
pornography of some sort; the Vanity Fair piece itself cites
at least two. But the question of who knew what, and when,
was mostly irrelevant to Bateman's criminal trial, which
centered on four specific counts relating to child
pornography. That case rested largely on a single witness
named Michael Caven (born Michael Pappas), a one-time student
of Bateman's from a high school on Long Island who had now
turned chief accuser and informant.
Bateman denied Caven's most damning charges--that he had
molested Caven from the age of 16, and that he had taken
pornographic pictures of him as a legal minor. But what
Bateman could not deny was that in the course of 1990 alone
he had sent or given Caven more than 100 pornographic video
tapes, and that at least some of these tapes were child
pornography. Bateman, for his part, never denied having given
Caven child pornography; he only denied having sent those
particular tapes through the mail. (``I'm not totally
stupid,'' he explained at his trial.)
And there was more. According to a pre-sentencing
memorandum submitted by the U.S. Attorney's office, boys at
Exeter had been filmed in the showers and bedrooms without
their knowledge, thanks to one of Bateman's hidden
cameras. ``The boys,'' the memo noted, ``are either
wearing undershorts, towels or nothing.'' Also in the
memo, according to the New York Times, was the fact that
Bateman spliced pieces of the students' tapes into
pornographic films. ``Mr. Bateman,'' the Times reported,
``duplicated tapes made by about 20 students for class
onto a master tape, giving each segment a name like
`Blonde Zen Lad' and `Belt Spanked.'''
Surreptitious filming of students, pornographic tape-
making, pornographic tape-editing, pornographic tape-swapping
with a former student, pornographic reconstruction of
homework videos: Not everyone prizes hobbies like these in a
boarding school teacher, with or without that library of
kiddie porn on the side. Certainly that was the view adopted
at last by Exeter itself, which fired Bateman within 24 hours
of his arrest. Something of that view seems also to have been
shared by federal district court judge Jose A. Fuste, who in
January 1993 sentenced Bateman to five years in prison
without parole for one count of possession and two counts of
interstate shipment of child pornography--a sentence that,
though hardly the maximum allowed by law, was a far cry from
leniency. (Under a fourth count, forfeiture, Bateman was also
forced to surrender his video equipment.) There was also the
influential fact that Bateman showed no remorse whatever for
his behavior. As a report in the New York Times put it when
the sentence was announced: ``He said he still did not
understand what was `so wrong' about what he had done. `If I
strangled a child, if somebody had been hurt, if somebody's
property had been destroyed, then there certainly would be a
victim,' Mr. Bateman said `Where are the victims?'''
Where, indeed? It is that question that reporter Jesse
Kornbluth sets out to answer, and the way he answers it will
likely take some readers by surprise. For the chief victim of
the Bateman affair, as it turns out, was not, say, Michael
Caven, or the Exeter students filmed in the showers, or
even all those little boys who were somehow made to
perform in all those movies with titles like Ballin' Boys
Duo, Young Mouthful, and Now, Boys? No, the chief victim
of it all--perhaps even the only victim, if the story told
in Vanity Fair is correct--appears to have been Bateman
himself.
In the first place, or so at least Kornbluth's essay makes
clear, Bateman was a victim of his accuser, Michael Caven
(alias Pappas). Caven, the reporter tells us, was a hustler,
an alcoholic, a druggie. He exploited rich, older men
(including, we are told, Frank Caven, the successful owner of
several gay bars who legally adopted his young sex partner in
a moment of drunken inspiration).
In fact, throughout Kornbluth's essay, not a kind or
empathetic word appears for the man who claimed to have been
abused by Bateman as a teenager. But there are, interestingly
enough, many, many words from the Pappas/Caven detractors,
and Caven is described by a former colleague in the bar
business as ``a jerk and an egotist. He was media crazy . . .
he loved to get his face in any rag in town.'' Bateman's
friends, he reports, ``loathe'' Michael Caven. ``If he wanted
to do Lane a favor, he could have said, `Get help,' '' one
snaps, ``Lane doesn't deserve to have his life ruined.''
Second, or so it appears on this telling, Bateman was the
victim of the ``brutality'' and ``frosty environment'' of
Exeter itself. (This turn looks ironic, for under Kendra
O'Donnell, who was appointed principal in 1987, the school
would seem to have entered a progressive warming phase; it
was under O'Donnell, for example, that Exeter--which now
boasts a Gay/Straight Alliance--invited gay alumni to come
and speak to the students about their sexuality.) Surely
Bateman's firing was hypocritical; after all, we are talking
about Exonians, who in Kornbluth's telling at least are a
worldly-wise and sexually sophisticated bunch. ``The idea
that single male teachers might be homosexual and
`appreciate' young men,'' (he writes of these preppies),
``would not be a soul-shattering revelation to Exeter
students.''
And, of course, the hapless Bateman was also a victim of a
society that forces homosexuals to act furtively. When faced
with the conservation of Exeter, where ``only one instructor
has come out,'' Lane Bateman stayed in the closet. And it was
all that time in the closet, it is argued here, that led to
his taste for child pornography. ``It's not healthy to be so
secretive, but Lane never felt secure enough at Exeter to
come out,'' explains a friend who has long known of Bateman's
interest in pornography. . . . `He's heavy into fantasy.
These sex movies are the legacy of the closet.' ''
In case the reader misses the point, Bateman is also
provided an opportunity to expound on it himself.
Bateman says he purchased the material that ultimately
brought him down several years before he started teaching at
Exeter, when he was coming out of the closet and wanted to
make up for lost time. ``For a few years, you could buy
anything, and I bought some films and books that featured
young boys,'' he says. ``For me, these pictures were
aesthetic, not pornographic. I know people say, these images
are despicable--how can you think that? But the key point is
that I identified with the boys, not the men. If someone
young had grabbed me when I was that age and said, `Let me
teach you something.' I would have said, Sure.''
And here, as with the example of Calvin Klein, we come to
the real heart of pedophilia chic: It's about boys. It is
boys and boys alone who are seen as fair sexual game. For if
Bateman's cache of child pornography had featured little
girls, rather than little boys, it is unthinkable that he
would have become the object of a sympathetic profile in the
likes of Vanity Fair. That a teacher whose sexual tastes run
to boys rather than girls could come to command a cultural
dispensation for that preference--this, rather than the
``legacy of the closet,'' would seem to be the ``deeper
meaning'' of the scandal at Exeter.
Biased though it was in favor of Lane Bateman, and much as
it seemed to suggest that child pornography may be a
victimless crime, the Vanity Fair piece at least stopped
short of endorsing either child pronography or pedophilia per
se. It is an amazing fact that these omissions would come to
seem positively retrograde in light of an essay appearing two
and a half years later in yet another stylish, widely
circulated magazine, the New Republic.
A Good Word for NAMBLA
The most overt attempt by a hip journal to give pedophiles
a place at the table came in the form of a May 8, 1995,
``Washington Diarist'' in the New Republic by Hanna Rosin
entitled ``Chickenhawk.'' Ostensibly inspired by a
``riveting'' documentary of the same name about the North
American Man-Boy Love Association, ``Chickenhawk'' opens with
the following quote from the film's star, a real-life
pedophile named Leyland Stevenson: ``He's just like a flower
in bloom. He's at that perfect stage, in which he is
hermaphroditic. . . . He's in that wonderful limbo between
being a child and an adolescent--he's certainly an
adolescent, but he has that weird feminine grace about him.''
Stevenson, of course, is talking about a little boy. It is
a quote intended to jolt the reader, and no doubt for most
readers it still does. Having already invited the reader to
imagine a child as seen through the eyes of a pedophile,
Rosin then proceeds to something more avant-garde still: a
chatty review of man-boy love and of the North American Man-
Boy Love Association (whose informal motto, as some readers
may know, is ``Eight is too late'').
``Chickenhawk,'' the author explains, ``is worth seeing''
because it ``succeeds, at least
[[Page H7527]]
partially, in making monsters human.'' Though it may be true
that Leyland Stevenson is ``every mother's worst nightmare,''
it is also true--at least true according to Hanna Rosin--that
Stevenson and his fellow NAMBLA members have gotten an
unnecessarily bad rap. ``There are no steamy orgies'' in the
documentary, she notes dryly, ``or bound-up boys languishing
in NAMBLA's basement.'' NAMBLA itself, she casually explains,
``functions mainly as a support group for fantasizers, with
the requisite forums for victim-bonding.'' Like members of
any other group united by common interests, its rank and file
have their humdrum clubby moments; they hold roundtables
(where they ``hug and share persecution stories''), solicit
subscriptions, exchange ``bulletins.'' Not only are these
activities benign, it seems, but their propriety is enforced
by the club itself. ``Group policy,'' we are assured,
``strictly forbids contact with live boys or even illicit
pictures on the premises.''
Next, Rosin praises NAMBLA's ``bravery.'' ``After all,''
she writes, ``it is still heresy even to consider the
possibility of the legitimacy of their feelings.''
Today's pedophiles, she reminds us, live in especially
unfriendly times. Politically, things could hardly be
worse; witness the tough language on child pornography in
the Contract with America. Even President Clinton, she
notes sarcastically, ``was cowed into taking a courageous
stand against `softness on child pornography,' '' Yet
NAMBLA, despite it all, continues pluckily on: ``keeping
all their activities above board''--even publishing their
New York phone number.
Just as the grownups of NAMBLA turn out to be more innocent
than one might expect, the boys, for their part, seem to be
far more sophisticated. As Rosin reasons, ``it might even be
that a budding young stud had the upper hand over the aging,
overweight loner.'' And how old does a boy have to be, in the
Rosin/NAMBLA view, to qualify for ``budding young stud''
status? Sixteen? Fourteen? Twelve? No? Well, how about ten?
One NAMBLA member in his 20s, an enticing blond with slits
for blue eyes, describes a sexual experience he had with a
karate instructor when he was 10. ``I came on to him. I knew
what I was doing. I felt very empowered. I felt I controlled
the relationship, which is a good thing for a kid. It dispels
the belief that adults are always in power in such
relationships. You know, I led him around. I was the one in
power.''
Well, boys just want to have fun--or, as the New Republic
seems to have it, just boys want to have fun. It is
``plausible,'' Rosin muses, that ``a teenage boy [emphasis
added] might agree to sex with an older man.'' Similarly,
though she notes approvingly that, for example, the age of
consent in the Netherlands is twelve, she nowhere advocates
changing the age-of-consent laws for girls. And she certainly
shies away from suggesting that the figure of the ``budding
young stud'' might be interchangeable with that of a
``budding young slut''--a phrase whose appearance would
surely have incurred the wrath of a good many New Republic
readers. ``Chickenhawk'' itself, interestingly enough, passed
almost without comment from those same subscribers.
kids want to please you
Actually, these latest attempts to manage a good word for
pedophilia are not quite as au courant as they first appear.
Similar themes have been floated for years by a number of
self-described, self-consciously gay writers--and not only by
those on the cultural fringe, but by several who have crossed
over to the mainstream literary market.
Perhaps the most prominent of these writers is the
acclaimed novelist and essayist Edmund White. The author of a
number of enthusiastically received novels--Forgetting Elena,
A Boy's Own Story, and The Beautiful Room is Empty--White has
also had a brilliant career as an editor and essayist. He has
worked at Saturday Review and Horizon, been a contributing
editor to Vogue and House and Garden, and written for
publications ranging from the New York Times Magazine to
Christopher Street., In 1980, a number of his pieces
reflecting on post-liberation gay life were collected into
yet another critically acclaimed book called States of
Desire: Travels in Gay America.
On account of its historical timing alone--the book amounts
to a city-by-city celebration of gay life published on the
very eve of the identification of AIDS--States of Desire
remains a fascinating and retrospectively poignant
sociological document. But it is a work that deserves to be
remembered for something else as well: It is probably the
most critically acclaimed piece of reportage in which the
taboo against pedophilia has been examined at considerable
length and judged archaic--a judgment that moreover passed
virtually without comment from White's admiring critics.
Throughout most of this reflection, White studiously keeps to
an Olympian ``on the one hand this, on the other hand that''
rhetorical monologue--in which one hand, as in most such
monologues, consistently manages to get the better of the
other.
Pedophilia, White asserts at the outset of this discussion,
is ``the most controversial issue'' in the lives of many in
the gay movement. It is also, the reader is led to
understand, a terribly complicated subject. As one gay
man--ostensibly not himself a pedophile--puts it in words
that the author quotes approvingly, ``There's no way to
answer it [the issue of pedophilia] without exploring it.
We need information and time for deliberation. There are
no clear answers--who would provide them?''
White is willing to try. ``Those who oppose pedophilia,''
he posits, ``argues that the `consent' or seeming cooperation
of an eight-year-old is meaningless.'' On the other hand,
``those who defend pedophilia reply that children are
capable, from infancy on, of showing reluctance.'' Similarly,
``critics of pedophilia contend that children are easily
manipulated by adults--through threats, through actual force,
through verbal coercion, through money.'' Here again, the
other side is allowed the last--and longest--word:
``Champions of pedophilia (and many other people) argue
that children are already exploited by adults in our
society--they are bullied by their parents, kept in financial
and legal subjugation, frequently battered. And they have
little legal recourse in attempting to escape punitive
adults. . . . They can't vote, they can't drink, they can't
run away, they can't enter certain movie theaters, they can't
refuse to go to school, they can't disobey curfew laws--and
they can't determine their own sexual needs and preferences.
Pedophiles find it ironic that our society should be so
worked up over the issue of sexual exploitation of children
and so unconcerned with all other (and possibly more
damaging) forms of exploitation. If anything, the pedophiles
argue, sex may be the one way in which children can win
serious consideration from adults and function with them on
an equal plane; if a child is your lover, you will treat him
with respect.'' [emphasis added]
And where does our narrator locate himself between these
camps? ``I am not in the business of recommending guidelines
for sex with youngsters,'' he writes coyly, for ``I simply
haven't gathered enough information about the various issues
involved.'' At the same time, though--or so the author
insists--``the question of sex with children remains''; and
White makes a final attempt to get to the bottom of it by
interviewing an actual pedophile in a bar in Boston.
This man, the author coolly reports, ``has a lover of
twelve (he met him when the boy was six).'' Far from the
voracious predator so feared by the general public, however,
our pedophile could scarcely appear more ethereal. He is
``thirty-six, dressed in faded denims, his face as innocent
and mournful as Petrouchka's. His voice was breathy and
light, his manner anxious and almost humble.'' Lest there be
any last doubt of this man's suitability for polite
company, White erases it with the ultimate compliment. ``I
was,'' he writes candidly, ``strongly attracted to him.''
There follows a conversation in which the amorous
adventures of White's pedophile are fondly recounted. White
asks how the man met his present ``lover,'' and the pedophile
replies: ``At the beach. He was there with his mother. He
came over to me and started talking. You see, the kids must
make all the moves.'' In case that point has been missed,
White reiterates it a few lines later, this time asking
explicitly: ``Did your friend take the sexual initiative with
you?'' ``Absolutely,'' Petrouchka affirms, adding, ``I've
been into kids since I was twenty-two and in every case the
kids were the aggressors.''
``What do you two do in bed?'' White next inquires. There
follows a graphic description, which the pedophile concludes
on a mournful note. For there is, as it turns out here, at
least one problem with man-boy love that most readers may not
have anticipated: namely, that the kids are too loving.
A second writer who has explicitly addressed the matter of
men and boys, this time adolescents, is Larry Kramer, author
of the hugely celebrated AIDS play ``The Normal Heart'' and
of an earlier novel called ``Faggots (1978),'' one of the
classics of the post-liberation gay genre. The comparison
between Kramer and White is particularly useful insofar as
the two authors differ markedly in a number of important
ways. Kramer's authorial perspective, as well as his
political persona (he is a well-known activist and co-founder
of the New York Gay Men's Health Crisis), have made him
something of an anomaly in his chosen circles. Between the
1970s and the dawn of AIDS, at a time when most gay figures
were proclaiming the joys of post-Stonewall ``liberation,''
Kramer, for his part, was nearly alone in emphasizing its
dark side. ``Faggots,'' for example--a controversial book
then and now--concerns the plight of a man looking for
homosexual love in the hedonistic heyday of Manhattan and
Fire Island. Kramer includes a number of scenes in which
older men drug, flatter, and seduce teenage boys. Most
prominent among these is a 16-year-old named Timmy, who
is initiated into the high life at a party by a series of
experienced men and finally ``devoured'' by ten at one
time. In the course of this brutal description--one of
several in the book involving adolescent boys--Kramer
repeatedly invokes the appeal of Timmy's ``beauty,'' his
``teenage skin,'' his status as ``forbidden fruit.'' One
by one, the men at the party succumb to Timmy's charms,
including even the most macho of them all (``the Winston
Man''), who finds himself ``excited in a way that he has
not been since'' high school.
Timmy's fate in the course of the book, it should be added,
is not a happy one. Is Kramer implying that such is the price
paid for decadence, or is there tacit empathy in his
depictions of Timmy's many would-be ``fathers''? It is left
to the reader to guess. Much less ambiguous, at any rate, is
the role played by Timmy and other ``youngsters'' in the
world that Faggots portrays.
Another celebrated gay author who broached the subject of
sex with minors is
[[Page H7528]]
the late Paul Monette. Monette's 1988 book Borrowed Time: An
AIDS Memoir garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award
nomination and was acclaimed by many as ``one of the most
eloquent works to come out of the AIDS epidemic'' (USA
Today). His 1992 book Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story won
the National Book Award. It is in this volume that Paul
Monette, like Edmund White before him, puts forth what would
once have been a controversial thesis about the sexual wants
of prepubescent boys. ``Nine is not too young to feel the
tribal call,'' he notes early on while recollecting his own
childhood adventures with a boy his age. ``Nine and a half is
old enough,'' he repeats later, adding the by-now familiar
note that ``for me at least, it was a victory of innocence
over a world of oppression.''
Several chapters later, while reminiscing about an aborted
affair he had with a high-school student while teaching at a
boarding school, Monette sounds another theme that once would
have been guaranteed to shock: that of the predatory,
empowered adolescent. ``Behind the gritted teeth of
passion,'' writes the author of his first sexual encounter
with a particular boy, ``I heard the ripple of laughter,
so one of us must have been having fun. Must've been Greg,
for I was too busy feeding on sin and death to play.''
``It was Greg who always chose the time,'' he continues,
adding dramatically, ``I stood ready to drop whatever I was
doing. . . . I lived in thrall to Greg's unpredictable
needs.''
That is not to say that Paul Monette, at the time, felt
himself relieved of responsibility for the affair--far from
it. ``If I am particular about the fact of being seduced--
putting it all on him, the will and the dare and then the
control--it doesn't mean I didn't feel the guilt. . . . I had
become the thing the heteros secretly believe about everyone
gay--a predator, a recruiter, an indoctrinator of boys into
acts of darkness.'' But this self-recrimination, he goes on
to reveal, was simply false consciousness. For finally, ``I
don't think that now. Twenty years of listening to gay men
recount their own adolescent seductions of older guys has put
it all in a different light.''
Have all these trial balloons just passed without comment
over the public head? One of the few critics to have taken
notice is Bruce Bawer, who in his 1993 book, A Place at the
Table castigates Edmund White in particular for his advocacy
of man-boy sex. Such radicalism, Bawer argues, is part of the
twisted legacy of the closet--a legacy that has forced
``subculture'' writers like White to evermore in-your-face
positions on account of their oppression by the rest of
society.
But writers have from time immemorial endured oppression--
including jail time and execution--without leaping to the
defense of pedophilia. And what kind of ``oppression'' is it,
exactly, that confers fame, fortune, critical raves, national
awards, and--in the case of Edmund White--a Guggenheim
fellowship and anointment as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts
et Lettres?
pedophile science
Actually, even the likes of White were being more
derivative than they would ever like to believe. Hands down,
if you'll pardon the expression, the real big daddy of
pedophilia chic could only be the long-dead Alfred C. Kinsey.
As Judith A. Reisman and Edward W. Eichel point out in their
1990 expose Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, ``It is Kinsey's work
which established the notion of `normal' childhood sexual
desire''--a notion that, as their book documents, was field-
tested on the bodies of hundreds of children, most of them
boys, in ways that might today be considered imprisonable
offenses.
How did Kinsey and his team get away with it? ``As we can
see now,'' wrote Tom Bethell in his excellent review of the
Kinsey facts for the May 1996 American Spectator, ``science
had vast prestige at the time and Kinsey exploited it. Any
perversion could be concealed beneath the scientist's smock
and the posture of detached observation.''
Yet if Kinsey is now suffering a public disrobing, his
intellectual heirs display their researches still. For a
final model of pedophilia chic--this one tricked out with all
requisite charts, tables, models, and talk of methodology--
consider a volume published in 1993 by Prometheus Books. As
its name seems to suggest, Prometheus is a publishing house
of cutting-edge aspiration, whose backlist reveals its focus
on issues like paranormal psychology, freethinking, and
humanism. And, oh yes, a trans-Atlantic exploration of the
virtues of pederasty called Children's Sexual Encounters with
Adults: A Scientific Study, by a trio identified as C.K. Li
(``a clinical psychologist in Paisley, Scotland''), D.J. West
(``Emeritus Professor of Clinical Criminology at Cambridge
University''), and T.P. Woodhouse (``a criminological
research worker in Ealing, England'').
Like our other pioneering looks at sex with kiddies,
Children's Sexual Encounters with Adults is sexually biased,
concentrating as it does on the ``startling contrast''
between boys and girls when it comes to sex with grownups.
(``Surveys,'' as the authors explain at some length, ``find
that on the whole boys are less likely than girls to
experience bad effects attributable to sexual incidents with
adults.'') It is not sexual contacts per se that pose
problems for children, the authors argue, but rather the
cultural prejudices by which most members of society judge
such acts. ``The damaging effects on children of intimate but
non-penetrative contacts with adults,'' note the authors
in a section on ``cultural relativity,'' ``are clearly
psychological rather than physical and to a considerable
extent dependent upon how such situations are viewed in
the society in which the child has been brought up.''
Again, and as Hanna Rosin and NAMBLA fans everywhere will
appreciate, the study also emphasize the positive side of
man-boy love for the boy in question. As one typical
paragraph has it:
``There is a considerable amount of evidence that some boys
are quite happy in relationships with adult homosexual men so
long as the affair does not come to light and cause scandal
or police action. . . . The great majority [of boys in a 1987
study] came from apparently normal homes, but were pleased to
have additional attention and patronage from a devoted adult
and willingly went along with his sexual requirements.''
Parents everywhere will be relieved to learn that
pedophiles themselves are not the predators of popular
imaginings, but congenial well-wishers much like Edmund
White's alluring Petrouchka. ``Men who approach boys,'' the
social scientists write in conclusion, ``are generally
looking for what amounts to a love relationship.'' Thus,
``they employ gradual and gentle persuasion. The average
pederast is no more seeking a rape-style confrontation than
is the average heterosexual when looking for a congenial
adult partner . . .''
At a time when almost every kind of advocacy comes equipped
with statistical batteries, it should come as no surprise
that pedophiles and their allies, too, have acquired their
own pseudo-scientific apparatus. Only the unsophisticated
would be surprised to find such a numerological polemic put
forward by a reputable publishing house and advertised in the
Barnes and Noble book catalog. But then, only the
unsophisticated stand in need of the reeducation its pages
offer. And there, to return to the figure of Larry Don
McQuay, is where the matter of pedophilia chic would seem to
stand. In one corner, enraged parents from across the country
screaming for help in protecting their children; in the
other, desiccated salonistes who have taken to wondering
languidly whether a taste for children's flesh is really so
indefensible after all. And they wonder why there's a culture
war.
____________________