At a South Carolina Tea Party rally,
one speaker wanted to know if South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham
is gay.
The rally held last week in Greenville
included an unidentified speaker saying: “Barney Frank is more
honest and brave than you. At least we know about Barney Frank, and
nobody is going to hold it over his head. And we got to just …
Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life,
Lindsey. But as a U.S. senator, I need to try and figure out why
you're trying to sell out your own countrymen. And I need to make
sure you being gay isn't it.”
At least some Tea Party members,
however, do care that Frank is gay.
Last month, several members hurled
anti-gay
slurs at the Massachusetts representative as they protested the
government's health care reform bill in the Capitol.
One protester reportedly yelled
“Barney, you fagot” as the 70-year-old lawmaker rounded a corner
to leave a government building. A surrounding crowd erupted in
laughter.
Frank also confirmed reports that other
protesters shouted “homo communist” at him and another told him
to “go homo to Massachusetts.”
Gay rumors have dogged the unmarried
Graham for years. Last year, openly lesbian politician Linda Ketner
outed Graham in an interview published on the progressive political
blog Fire
Dog Lake.
“We have more gay people serving in
South Carolina than probably in any place in the United States.
They're just not out of the closet,” she said, then gave the
examples of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina State Senator
Glenn McConnell and Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer. Ketner, who
came close to unseating incumbent S.C. Representative Henry Brown
last November, later apologized for her remarks. Bauer denied he's
gay – calling
the rumor “silly” – after blogger Mike
Rogers outed him.
Graham, a Republican who sits on the
Senate Armed Services Committee, has steadfastly dodged questions
about his sexuality, most recently when asked by Mike Stark, who
blogs at The
Crooked Dope.
Last year, a
baffled Graham answered “Right … Right … OK” when Stark asked
him about the rumors as the senator made his way to a meeting on
Capitol Hill.
Writing at Salon, War Room blogger
Gabriel Winant suggested that in fact the Tea Party speaker is
opposed to Graham being gay: “What's interesting here is the
thought obviously running through the speaker's head: that something
about the personal features of a politician like Barney Frank or
Lindsey Graham explains their otherwise disagreeable behavior. The
argument isn't that Frank and, supposedly, Graham, are horrible
liberal traitors, and gay to boot. It's that they are, or might be,
horrible liberal traitors because they're gay.”
Whether gay or straight, Graham has
consistently voted against gay rights legislation.