[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.

                          ____________________