How To Write About Lindsey Graham While Ignoring What Living In The Closet Does To A Person

Brian Stelter used his CNN.com column, Reliable Sources, to report that "Once upon a time, Lindsey Graham was a Republican senator who was not afraid to exit the Fox-verse and appear on other networks. But, in recent months, Graham has been appearing almost exclusively on Fox. In fact, he’s become a regular fixture on the president’s favored network. Since September 1, 2019, Graham has appeared at least 36 times on either Fox News or Fox Biz. He has appeared twice on CBS News in that time frame. We couldn’t locate any other interviews he has sat down for on other networks."

Just in time for Mark Binelli's Lindsey Graham profile, How Lindsey Graham Lost His Way for Rolling Stone. Interesting piece for people interested in Lindsey Graham, although there is one glaring flaw. The phrase "closet case" was never really talked about. Binelli skirted around the "rumors" that Graham is gay, but gave more space to denial than to assertion. It reminded me of the nonsense journalists used to cover up for other obvious closet cases like Mark Foley (R-FL), Denny Hastert (R-IL), Ed Schrock (R-VA), Jon Hinson (R-MS), Steve Gunderson (R-WI), Aaron Schock (R-IL) and Larry Craig (R-ID)-- to name a few-- before they were "officially" outed. I don't know or care who Lindsey Graham has sex with or if he does or he doesn't. What's important is the nature of closet cases and it has been covered extensively by some Republican politicians who were outed.

Two who explained it well are former raging homophobes Robert Bauman, once a closeted GOP congressional leader, and Roy Ashburn, once a closeted California state Senator. Here, watch Ashburn explain how toxic it is for a legislator to live in a fearful, dark closet and how it turns someone into an inveterate liar who eventually loses track of the difference between truth and lies.





This statement by Ashburn is typical of the Republican closet cases who have been outed and everyone knows Lindsey Graham is always ever so close to saying approximately the same thing: "I was in hiding and so casting any kind of vote might, could, in some way lead to my secret being revealed. That was terrifying to me; it was paralyzing. And so I cast some votes that have denied gay people of their basic equal treatment under the law. And I'm not proud of it." As I noted in 2012 the Lavender Scare is an integral part of conservative politics.

Robert Bauman's book, The Gentleman From Maryland: The Conscience of A Gay Conservative, is more important if you want to understand what makes closeted politicians like Lindsey Graham tick. Bauman had come a very long way from living as a a self-loathing, denier who voted against gays while sneaking out of his marital bed to troll for quickie sex with other males in the shadows of the Capitol by the times he was able to muster the clarity to wrote his book. He sought to warn future Republican elected officials against the hypocrisy of the closet. His warnings have gone unheeded by three generations of conservative closet cases in Congress and government. Remember, Bauman wasn't just some run of the mill Republican. He was one of the founders of both the Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union and served as chairman of each. He was a leader of anti-gay hysteria among Republicans in Congress, while he was sneaking around-- a married man-- having sex with underage boys. Eventually he was arrested with a 16 year old, shunned by his colleagues, rejected by his constituents, divorced by his wife... his life a shambles.

Benelli's Graham (closeted) is worried he could lose his seat-- the only thing he has in an otherwise miserable existence-- if he doesn't pretend to be a raging right-wing maniac and Trumpist. That's the story. Binelli's anecdotes are very good and make it worth reading. This was a good one by McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt: "People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power-- but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits."

David Woodard, is a political-science professor at Clemson University. He ran Graham’s first two campaigns for the House and recalls the first-term congressman as quickly becoming the unofficial social director for his freshman class, though he added, "You’re going to find Lindsey knows a lot of people, but he’s not close to anybody." Binelli closes his very long profile by asking Woodward what motivates Graham to stay in politics after all these years. "I’ve thought about that. He’s alone. It’s not like he has a family, a child. His time, when he’s away from the spotlight, I think is a lonely time. He’s more comfortable in the spotlight where he’s Senator Lindsey Graham, talking about things he knows a lot about. I thought he wouldn’t run in 2020. And then he did the Kavanaugh thing, and he’s the Trump buddy. If Trump wins a second term, he might wind up in the Cabinet, maybe Secretary of Defense? The South, and South Carolina in particular, has a history of sending ’em back. He’s got Thurmond’s seat, and Thurmond had that seat until he was 100. So he could have a long way to go."

Another Republican Closet Case-- This One In Tennessee-- Caught With The Meat In His Mouth

But he doesn't look gay. Well... he does "look" gay in a blue state way, but in red states? This is exactly what gay political closet cases look like. Meet Bill Sanderson, a state Rep from Dyer County, in northwest Tennessee, about 80 miles north of Memphis-- a godforsaken area where Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri all meet. There aren't many Democrats in Dyer County anymore. Trump trounced Hillary up there 10,175 (76.6%_ to 2,815 (21.2%). The most famous person from Dyer County was Emmett Kelly, Jr., world famous clown who copied his father's style, Emmett Kelly, Sr. Most people assumed the most famous GOP closet case from the tri-state area was Republican Congressman Jason Smith of southeast Missouri. But now... what's in the water up there that makes people stay closeted?

On Wednesday, Sanderson resigned the HD 77 seat in the Tennessee House. He had never worried about being defeated. In fact, the last time a Democrat even ran against him was in 2012 when that guy "held Sanderson down" to a 66% win. So why did he suddenly resign? Sanderson: "It’s no scandal, no controversy. It’s strictly a family situation, a business situation... It’s just overwhelming. I feel smothered." However...

As for rumors swirling around Capitol Hill that there are incriminating photos or social media posts of him, Sanderson said anything like that would have to be a fabrication.

“I’m a happily married man. I’ve got a wonderful wife,” he said.

One way you can identify a right-wing closet case is by how anti-gay they are. The more anti-gay, the more likely they are to be covering something up. You don't have to take my word for this. Former Maryland GOP raving homophobe and high-up Republican congressman, Bob Bauman, wrote a book about it, The Gentleman from Maryland. And when the de-facto head of the California anti-gay contingent in the state Senate, Roy Ashburn, was outed with a young male prostitute in his car, he did a great deal of introspection and began talking:



Maybe one day Sanderson, a "family values," "Trump-Christian" will too, but now he's in total denial. The LGBT community in Tennessee knows what Sanderson is though: "Since he took office in 2011, Tennessee state Rep. Bill Sanderson (R-Kenton) has voted repeatedly in favor of legislation designed to harm the LGBT community. During that same time period, the 59-year-old Sanderson has also been openly soliciting sex with much younger men on Grindr, a gay hook-up and dating app, both from his home in West Tennessee and in Nashville." Yikes!

Sanderson’s campaign website states he “is proudly pro-life and pro-family … [and] is leading the charge to defend the rights of the unborn and preserve the values that have defined our families for generations,” adding that he “knows that our nation was founded on conservative, Christian values.” His (now-deleted) campaign Facebook page describes Sanderson as a “Family Man, Small Business Man, Farmer, Public Servant” whose favorite activities include running, working in the yard and “spending time with my dear wife, Marjie (the person with the best heart of anyone I have ever, ever met).” (Sanderson has been married to Marjie since the fall of 2012. He has three grown children with his first wife, Valerie; they divorced in 2011.)

His voting record during his four and a half sessions on the hill back up his conservative bonafides. Sanderson introduced legislation to mandate “In God We Trust” on state license plates. He has been a co-sponsor of some of the most extreme anti-abortion legislation, including this year’s heartbill bill (which passed the House but was delayed in the Senate until next year). In 2018, Sanderson, then the chair of the State Government Subcommittee, was widely criticized for helping kill a resolution denouncing Neo-Nazis and opposing a bill to outlaw chain gangs, saying such work was not dehumanizing to prisoners.

And Sanderson has voted in support of almost every anti-LGBT bill that has made it to the House floor. Despite having a gay son with a longterm partner. Despite sending sexually explicit messages and pictures to men almost 40 years his junior.

Sanderson’s extracurricular activities have long been an open secret around the Capitol. I, for one, have known about a set of Grindr communications for three years. But only recently, in the wake of the scandals involving House Speaker Glen Casada and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren, along with the increasing pressure to oust alleged molester Rep. David Byrd (R-Waynesboro), did sources agree to let me write about the messages and encounters.

...Sanderson, during his time in office, has cast many, many votes in support of anti-LGBT legislation. In 2011, Sanderson voted to adopt HB 600, which banned municipalities from adopting ordinances prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination and overrode and nullified an ordinance that Nashville had adopted. In 2012, Sanderson voted for legislation requiring abstinence-based sex education in public schools, a bill that notably banned discussion of “gateway sexual activity.” (Never mind that premarital abstinence tends to not end up so well.)

In 2016 Sanderson signed onto a resolution denouncing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. He then voted to defund the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Office of Diversity over a controversy surrounding the annual Sex Week and the use of gender neutral pronouns. Sanderson supported HB 1840, the bill that allowed therapists to decline to see patients if they are gay, in violation of the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics. In 2017, he voted for HB 1111, the “natural and ordinary meaning” bill, widely perceived as an effort to attack LGBT parents.

Earlier this year, Sanderson voted in support of HB 1274, which would require the state to defend local school systems from lawsuits if they passed a transgender bathroom ban; in favor of HB 1151, a watered down attempt at a transgender bathroom ban; and for HB 836, which would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples seeking to adopt. However, when it came up in committee, Sanderson did vote against the adoption bill, and on the floor he abstained from voting on HB 563, a bill the Tennessee Equality Project calls a “Business License to Discriminate.” (HB 1151 has been signed into law; the other three bills await passage in the Senate in 2020. Sanderson also says he has attempted to kill many other anti-LGBT bills in committee, which TEP does confirm.)

During many, if not all, of these votes, Sanderson has been on Grindr (and possibly other apps). In a Grindr profile from 2013, Sanderson, calling himself “Brian,” describes himself as being in an “open relationship.” For all I know, that may be true. As a man born in 1959 who attended the small Methodist Lambuth University in Jackson, Tenn., Sanderson didn’t have the liberty to come out as queer easily as I did at age 19 at Yale in 1996. (Sanderson says he was not in an open relationship and told me that if I published this story it would ruin his marriage. He denied being either bisexual or gay or having ever sexually touched a man.)

Whatever the private reality of Sanderson’s marriage, his public face is extremely at odds with the Grindr and text messages I reviewed. They all include pictures of Sanderson, including one of his naked torso and genitals. That very explicit picture has his face cropped out of it, but Sanderson is wearing the same watch in other photos. (He says the nude photo is faked, and the other pictures were stolen from his Facebook account.)

The Grindr messages that I reviewed, as in the ones posted by The Dirty, instruct the men to text him at a phone number with a 731 area code. If you Google that number, you’ll find page after page connecting that number to either the White Squirrel Winery-- which Sanderson owns-- or sites where it is listed as Sanderson’s cell number. The texts I saw were sent by the same number. It is the same number I used to call Sanderson for comment on this story and have texted him on since. (Again, he claims that the texts were faked.)

Those texts, in addition to including the nude photo, are frequently explicit in terms of discussing sexual activity. I’m not going to quote from the explicit parts, as Sanderson (allegedly) exchanged them with a reasonable expectation of privacy. But I will note that in his 2013 Grindr profile, which could be seen by anyone using the app, he writes, “I’ve seen a lot and done a lot, but I really haven’t had a connection with a guy and I have a burning desire to have that relationship. I like down and dirty guy to guy play too! So, I guess you might say, nothing will be held back …” (Sanderson says he did not write this.)

While some closeted men do use Grindr to sext and get off without ever meeting anyone, the messages sent by Sanderson that I have seen always suggest meeting in person. In one set, Sanderson even mentions having seen the man and his roommate at a restaurant the previous night, before asking, “Want to meet and play?” This man, who was 20 at the time, did not meet up but did exchange explicit texts with Sanderson in 2013.

One former UT Martin student connected with Sanderson on Grindr several years ago when he was 19. In 2016, WKRN-TV recorded an interview with this man but decided later not to run the story. (Sanderson says he pressured the station to kill the story.) I have spoken to multiple people who confirm the man’s account, including a friend who was told about it at the time and shown the corresponding messages and pictures. All, including the former reporter (who is no longer at WKRN), had consistent accounts of the man’s recollections.

The former student says that Sanderson messaged him on Grindr and he agreed to meet with him in person. He was studying political science, and Sanderson was a state legislator; the man says he was hoping Sanderson could offer advice in regards to getting legislative jobs in Nashville after graduation. Although he assumed Sanderson was sexually interested in him, the man says he was not attracted to the legislator because of the massive age difference. After a winery tour, the man says, Sanderson tried to massage his shoulders and otherwise hit on him in a manner that made him feel uncomfortable. Sanderson also served the man wine, despite knowing he was 19, and gave him bottles of wine to take home. (Sanderson says he verifies the identification of everyone to whom he serves wine at White Squirrel.)

The man says that Sanderson’s wife Marjie unexpectedly came home, and that he was pressured by the legislator to make up a story on the fly about why he was on the property. A year later, he says, when he was in Nashville, he received another Grindr message from Sanderson (in town for the legislative session) trying to hook up. The man did not reply.

A Closet Mentality Is All About Deceit-- And Can Be Very Problematic To Break Free Of-- The Case Of McKinsey Pete

On Friday we took a little look at McKinsey Pete's gay identity politics. Several people have asked me to explain why living in the closet is such a terrible thing. To live a double life, a person has to start learning how to lie and deceive and eventually that deceitfulness takes over someone's whole being and they stop understanding when they're lying and when they're telling the truth, not just about their sexuality, but about everything. This is something I've studied carefully when it comes to politicians. I read and then re-read Maryland top-dog GOP outed congressman Bob Bauman's fantastic book, The Gentleman From Maryland. Bauman, founder of the American Conservative Union and Young Americans For Freedom, wrote poignantly about how his secret double life was so stressful that it led to alcoholism. I had dinner with Mark Foley after he was caught bonking young congressional pages and we began an honest years-long correspondence. And here in California when far right-wing ultra-homophobic state Senator Roy Ashburn was caught, drunk, with a young male prostitute, I studied his fascinating public epiphany. I respect him for it. He now talks about how a tawdry and fearful existence in the closet ruined his life (below) and forced him into an existence predicated on hypocrisy and deceit. Ashburn, when asked if he's been a hypocrite, said, flatly, YES! "I was in hiding."





From an L.A. Times interview Patt Morrison did with Roy Ashburn in 2010 soon after he was busted:

For decades you worked so hard to keep your sexual orientation under wraps. This must have been a torment, but in another sense, was there an element of relief?

I'm sensing relief now. I had not consciously decided to come out, but there's no doubt looking back that I had become increasingly bold about attending gay events, like pride festivals, and going to dance clubs and bars. Last year I attended Las Vegas Pride and San Diego Pride.

Were you looking over your shoulder?

A little more in San Diego than Las Vegas.

...At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind-- the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press-- at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

You worked for members of Congress, then were elected to public office yourself from Kern County. Were your sexual preferences in the back of your mind, or did you just go about your business?

The answer is both yes and no. I was married and had children. And I had a career and a passion. I also had a huge secret. But given my circumstances and my responsibilities, it wasn't an overwhelming issue for me. The desires were always there, but my focus was primarily on-- well, pretty selfishly-- on me and my career and my family.

Barry Goldwater had a gay grandson and didn't think government had any business in anybody's bedroom. But the recent brand of Republicanism has championed anti-gay issues.

I truly believe the conservative philosophy as embraced by Goldwater: that the government has no role in the private lives of the citizens. In the 1980s, there was a coming together of the religious right and the Goldwater right, sort of a marriage of convenience. It propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan never repudiated that but-- this is just my view-- I don't think he really embraced it either. In no way do I want to put down people of strong religious convictions; I happen to have very strong religious beliefs myself. But it was a merger of those two, and the religious [right's issues] were about same-sex rules, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun rights, these sort of core, litmus-test issues.

Did you feel uneasy with that combination? You did help to organize and speak at a rally in 2005 against a legislative bill sanctioning same-sex marriage.

How I ever got into that is beyond me. I was very uncomfortable with that, and I told one of my confidantes, "I'm never doing that again." It was not what I wanted to do, it wasn't me, but I helped to organize and lent my name.

A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners.

The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

"Roy [Cohn] was not gay," Republican operative and Trump crony Roger Stone remarked about Trump's mentor, to CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin. "He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around." Political closet cases live in darkness, fear and self deception. Their lives are a lie and lying becomes the norm. All Republican closet cases are, at heart, Roy Cohn. A lifelong homosexual-- and a swell guy-- Mark Foley, long before he was caught, drunk, sneaking into a boys dormitory looking for sex, was a critic of President Clinton. "It's more sad," he told the media, "than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

McKinsey Pete is a Democrat, so at least politically, he is very different from Bauman, Foley, Cohn and Ashburn (not to mention Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, neither of whom has been publicly outed yet). Sunday, the NY Times published a sure-to-be-controversial piece by Jeremy Peters, Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet-- And why it took him until he was 33 to come out.

The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out-- all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too.

Chris Pappas, who was two years ahead of Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard and is now a Democratic congressman from New Hampshire, said he arrived at college “pretty much convinced that I couldn’t have a career or pursue politics as an L.G.B.T. individual.” Jonathan Darman, who was one class ahead of Mr. Buttigieg, remembered how people often reacted to a politician’s coming out then: “It wasn’t a story of love but of acknowledging illicit desire.” And Amit Paley, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class, recalled that “it was still a time where vocalizing anti-gay sentiments was not only common, but I think pretty accepted.”

The thought that 15 years later someone they might have shared a dorm or sat in a lecture hall with would become the first serious openly gay candidate for president of the United States never crossed their minds. But no one would have found the possibility more implausible than the young man everyone on campus knew as Peter.

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Many in his generation and in his college class decided to come out as young adults, whether they were confident they would be accepted or not, and had their 20s to navigate being open about their identity-- a process that helped make Americans more aware and accepting of their gay friends, family members and co-workers. Instead, Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age-- even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard-- he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

He took a longer journey than his peers did, he has said, because of the inner turmoil he experienced over whether in fact he wanted to be known as the “gay” politician.

His record of accomplishment during those years in the closet is impossible to separate from the isolation and anxiety he felt as he weighed the cost of telling his family, friends and constituents who he really was. Pursuing so many goals had two outcomes, intentionally or not: It distracted his busy brain from a reality he wasn’t ready to face, and provided him the armor of a life experience that would make his sexual orientation just one of a litany of attributes.

“Peter struck me very early on, at 18 or 19, as someone who would run for president regardless,” said Randall Winston, a close friend of Mr. Buttigieg’s from college. Over beers and Chinese food, Mr. Winston said, they spent late nights on campus talking about the right and wrong reasons for getting into politics. “If you want to be a political leader, why?” he recalled. “Is it about yourself? Is it really about the good of the nation? I think he was asking himself those questions from the jump.”

Mr. Buttigieg said in the interview that if he had been interested in a career other than politics, he would have found the decision to come out much easier. “The arts is one where you could have jumped in there in the 2000s, and it would have been sort of incidental,” he said. “Whereas something like finance, it was getting there. And in politics it would have been completely defining.”

Few experiences in his young adulthood were as formative in shaping his identity as the hypercompetitive environment he encountered at Harvard. Even liberal Cambridge, where meeting a gay student or professor would have been fairly unremarkable, did not always nurture the sense of confidence that he and many of his gay classmates felt they needed to be themselves. At times their surroundings seemed to do just the opposite.

In interviews with a dozen of Mr. Buttigieg’s friends and classmates, people described a culture in which a mix of abundant ambition and youthful insecurity made students carefully attuned to the way they presented themselves to others.

Mr. Winston recalled the dual pressures of having high expectations for yourself while also being aware-- sometimes realistically, sometimes not-- that your classmates and professors had their own ideas about who you were too.

“I don’t want to say it’s all artifice-- a lot of this is just common to growing up,” he said. But the culture at Harvard, he added, caused a lot of students to think, “‘O.K., I’m going to maintain this aura, this impression I’m giving to others.’”

Describing the insecurities he felt as a young man, Mr. Buttigieg has said he sometimes marvels at how differently the world treats him today compared with what he expected when he was too afraid to come out. On the day he kicked off his presidential campaign, he said he had imagined what he would say to his teenage self. “To tell him that on that day he announces his campaign for president, he’ll do it with his husband looking on,” he said with a note of disbelief in his voice. “Would he believe me?”

Mr. Buttigieg took a long and fraught path from life as an undergraduate who once had a girlfriend to a presidential candidate who travels the country with his husband in tow. While he was still in the closet, the country became a different place very quickly. And to understand Mr. Buttigieg’s journey is to understand the microgeneration in which he came of age.

When members of the Harvard class of 2004 were juniors in high school, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming, was bludgeoned, tied to a fence post and left to die in a murder that shocked the nation’s conscience. By the time they shipped off to Cambridge, few would have any gay friends — at least ones who were open about it. And the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman, seemed almost absurd. The closest thing gay men and lesbians had to marriage was a civil union, which in 2000 was legal in exactly one state: Vermont.

“Gay marriage was not this obvious liberal no-brainer,” said Mr. Darman, a journalist and historian who came out in his senior year of college, 12 years before Mr. Buttigieg would. While Harvard was certainly a liberal bubble, it was still in many ways very socially conventional in the early 2000s, he said. “In a lot of social settings at Harvard in that period, the default assumption was that you were straight. And that would not have been true even five years later.”

Friends and classmates remembered Mr. Buttigieg as thoughtful and clearly on a trajectory that would bring him success of some kind, even if it dawned on few of them that might mean the White House.

One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

“His sexuality didn’t present as a really big thing in his life,” said Joe Flood, a classmate. “I think he always thought about himself politically,” he added, noting that Mr. Buttigieg would become active in the university’s Institute of Politics, an organization at the Kennedy School of Government that hosted big-name politicians like Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Howard Dean during their time in school. “You don’t end up there accidentally,” Mr. Flood said... There was a small, close-knit social circle of L.G.B.T.Q. students. But they existed a world apart from Mr. Buttigieg’s Harvard.

Peter at Harvard

...But when Mr. Buttigieg and his peers left college and started embarking on their professional lives, the country was changing in significant ways, jolting their sense of what it could mean to be openly gay and have a high-profile career.

One of the biggest developments was right in Harvard’s backyard. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state where same-sex couples could marry. Students flocked to Cambridge City Hall in the early-morning hours on May 17 to watch the first couples wed at 12:01 a.m.-- the earliest moment possible under the new law. Mr. Buttigieg remembers the occasion but was not there. “I don’t remember feeling that connected to it actually,” he said.

Soon states from Iowa to Maine would start allowing same-sex couples to marry. Then Congress would repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on serving openly as gay or lesbian. And the Supreme Court would declare the rights of gay men and lesbians to have their relationships recognized by the state, first in 2013 when it struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, and then again in the 2015 decision that guaranteed same-sex marriage as a right protected by the Constitution in Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 2004, when Mr. Buttigieg’s class graduated, public opinion polls showed that roughly one-third of Americans favored allowing same-sex couples to marry. A decade later it was more than half the country and rising.

Many closeted people found their plight more difficult during the early years of social and legal change, as they wrestled with whether to finally open up after years of trying to maintain an impression of themselves that was false.

Mr. Paley, who was Mr. Buttigieg’s college classmate, remembers sitting in his dorm room in 2003 as a closeted junior and crying as he read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down bans on intimacy between homosexuals on grounds that such laws were an affront to their dignity. “That helped me realize I can’t live my life this way,” he said of hiding his sexual orientation. It took Mr. Paley until the end of his senior year to fully come out, and he now serves as chief executive of the Trevor Project, an organization that works to advance the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Mr. Pappas, the congressman from New Hampshire, ran his first race for state legislature in 2002 as an openly gay candidate and won. “It’s an important facet of who I am,” he said. “And I think over time I realized how powerful it was that I share that with more and more people.”

He said he ran as an out candidate in that first race because he saw no point in turning back after he came out in college. And after hearing from people who told him how encouraging it was to see him as an openly gay man in politics, Mr. Pappas realized he had made the right choice regardless of the political implications. “I don’t think I fully appreciated that at first,” he said.

After he graduated, Mr. Buttigieg went to work for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in Arizona and quickly immersed himself in the job. Mara Lee, who worked with him at the time and remains a friend, remembered meeting her co-worker for the first time: “Here’s this guy who’s doing a million things at once. He has seven or eight TVs on to monitor the local and national news. He’s introducing himself to me-- being genuine-- and having a conversation while typing.” She remembers two computer screens on his desk.

Once he came out, she said that being gay was never the first thing he wanted people to see when they met him-- a veteran, Rhodes scholar, polyglot who was first elected mayor of South Bend when he was 29. “While it’s an important part of who he is, it’s not the only part,” she said.

When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

His employees and constituents saw an eligible bachelor in their young mayor and wanted to set him up with their daughters. Some on his staff even joked about his old light green Ford Taurus as a “chick magnet.” He did not bother to correct them.

When he did come out in the summer of 2015, the forum he chose was an op-ed for the South Bend Tribune. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am,” he wrote.

He may have waited far longer than most young gay men today. But ever the overachiever, he made record time in setting a new bar. In less than four years he went from being single and closeted to being married and out as a gay candidate for president.

Peters, who is a member of the LGBTQ community and not closeted, didn't bother to mention that he's gay for this story. He probably should have. But something more important that he should have done is spend some time looking into Pete's time as a consultant for McKinsey, a firm that inculcates its employees with an ability to lie smoothly and effectively. Pete's life in the closet prepared him for that perfectly-- for that and for the life of a politician. He may not lie as much as Trump and Biden... but he's still young and tends not to tell the truth about anything that can be seen as controversial.

Bernie also beat Hillary in South Bend

Chalk Up Hastert's Life Of Raping Underage Boys To One Thing: Conservative Values

Conservative politicians want to give your underage sons some thrills

Denny Hastert didn't just molest 4 boys when he was a wrestling coach. Nor did he just molest 5 boys. While he presided over a viciously homophobic congressional Republican Party, he was still carrying on an active-- albeit closeted-- gay sex life. He'd hire a gay hooker in the evening and come into Congress the next morning and help pass a law to make life more difficult for LGBT families. It wasn't just a Denny Hastert problem; it wasn't even just a Republican Party problem. It's a fatal flaw in the American conservative movement: a tolerance for bigotry and hatred and a willingness to cater to the lowest instincts of the most unevolved and primitive among us to get support for the kind of economic inequality that drastically elevates the billionaires and millionaires against the rest of society. It was an economically and socially rewarding position for politicians like Hastert.

DWT reported about Hastert's homosexuality and hypocrisy for over a decade. The Establishment media knew for all that time and chose not to report it, just as they chose to not report years and years and years of Mark Foley raping underage boys while he was a Florida congressman voting against the legitimate aspirations of gays and lesbians looking for equality under the law. People were outraged that I dared write dozens of posts about Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, Patrick McHenry and Hastert "without proof," while they continued voting for bigotry and continued having sex with boys and men. I pitied those critics and, in part blamed them for the continuation of outrages against children they refused to protect.

And this is an old story in RepublicanWorld. Former Maryland congressman and right-wing firebrand, Republican Bob Bauman, wrote an autobiography in 1986, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, that warned future Republicans against the hypocrisy of the closet. His warnings have gone unheeded by two generations of conservative closet cases in Congress and government. Remember, Bauman wasn't just some run of the mill Republican. He was one of the founders of both the Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union and served as chairman of each. He was a leader of anti-gay hysteria among Republicans in Congress, while he was sneaking around-- a married man-- having sex with underage boys. Eventually he was arrested with a 16 year old, shunned by his colleagues, rejected by his constituents, divorced by his wife... his life a shambles.

Six years ago, in California, state Senator Roy Ashbury-- the penultimate leader of the anti-gay forces in the state legislature-- was pulled over, drunk, with a young male prostitute he had picked up in a bar, his carefully crafted "family values" political and personal life forever shattered. Instead of hiding under a rock like most outed GOP politicians, Ashburn decided to come clean. This is from an interview in the L.A. Times 3 months after his arrest. It's an indictment of hypocrisy and bigotry and the very conservative "value" that insists gays stay in the closet, a value that inevitably leads to the tragedies of congressmen like Denny Hastert, Aaron Schock (R-IL), Mark Foley (R-FL), Ed Schrock (R-VA), Jon Hinson (R-MS) Larry Craig (R-ID)...

For decades you worked so hard to keep your sexual orientation under wraps. This must have been a torment, but in another sense, was there an element of relief?

I'm sensing relief now. I had not consciously decided to come out, but there's no doubt looking back that I had become increasingly bold about attending gay events, like pride festivals, and going to dance clubs and bars. Last year I attended Las Vegas Pride and San Diego Pride.

Were you looking over your shoulder?

A little more in San Diego than Las Vegas.

...At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind-- the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press-- at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

You worked for members of Congress, then were elected to public office yourself from Kern County. Were your sexual preferences in the back of your mind, or did you just go about your business?

The answer is both yes and no. I was married and had children. And I had a career and a passion. I also had a huge secret. But given my circumstances and my responsibilities, it wasn't an overwhelming issue for me. The desires were always there, but my focus was primarily on-- well, pretty selfishly-- on me and my career and my family.

Barry Goldwater had a gay grandson and didn't think government had any business in anybody's bedroom. But the recent brand of Republicanism has championed anti-gay issues.

I truly believe the conservative philosophy as embraced by Goldwater: that the government has no role in the private lives of the citizens. In the 1980s, there was a coming together of the religious right and the Goldwater right, sort of a marriage of convenience. It propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan never repudiated that but — this is just my view — I don't think he really embraced it either. In no way do I want to put down people of strong religious convictions; I happen to have very strong religious beliefs myself. But it was a merger of those two, and the religious [right's issues] were about same-sex rules, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun rights, these sort of core, litmus-test issues.

Did you feel uneasy with that combination? You did help to organize and speak at a rally in 2005 against a legislative bill sanctioning same-sex marriage.

How I ever got into that is beyond me. I was very uncomfortable with that, and I told one of my confidantes, "I'm never doing that again." It was not what I wanted to do, it wasn't me, but I helped to organize and lent my name.

A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners.

The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

When it comes to marriage, I'm getting the feeling that you're mulling over whether government ought to be in the marriage license business at all.

It's a very complicated issue, marriage, but it seems to me that the government's role is to protect a civil contract, whether it's to purchase a home together, enter into whatever financial or legal arrangement, including marriage. The whole issue of marriage as a 5,000-year-old tradition, a religious context, a historical context-- what government's role is, is the sanctification of the legal bond. Then it seems to me a matter for a church or some other societal organization but not for government.

What have you been talking about with the gay groups you've been meeting with?

The same things we're talking about. I don't have an agenda. I don't have a plan. I don't have an expectation. I just want people to know who I am and what's in my heart. I kept that from people. I concealed it from everyone for almost all my life, so I'm [now] privileged to work with people from all aspects of life, including organizations devoted to advancing the rights of gay and lesbian and transgendered individuals.

Recently in the Senate you spoke in favor of a resolution calling on Congress to repeal "don't ask, don't tell.''

For that day I knew I had to say something. I already had prepared what I was going to say about serving in the military, and I actually had it written out because I wanted to be precise. But I had to preface it with something else, to give context to why all this time in elective office and being so deeply hidden, why was I now standing and speaking on this subject matter, and so I did.

...You're divorced, with four daughters and grandchildren. So here's where I ask about your family, and you can tell me to buzz off.

The things we're talking about were my choices. It was my choice to keep it secret; it was my choice to be a gay man and be married and have children. It was my choice to build a life on lies in order to conceal myself. That obviously had a big effect on my marriage and my children in ways that I don't fully comprehend, but it's my responsibility and not something to be talked about in interviews.

Thanks to Pelosi there was no trial and Foley still insists it was just naughty e-mails

Until this weekend, Hastert had been granted unofficial deniability from the justice system. He's myriad legal cases were never specifically about child rape. And Hastert, who paid millions of the dollars he earned as a sleazy lobbyist to cover up his sex crimes, is now insisting he shouldn't go to prison for several reasons, one of which is that he was punished enough when his official Speaker of the House portrait was taken down. Comedian Andy Richter was a student at the high school in Yorkville where Hastert was raping his students and the interview he did with USAToday isn't funny.

Federal prosecutors alleged in a court document filed Friday evening that Hastert abused or had inappropriate contact with at least five minor boys during his time at Yorkville High School, west of Chicago. Hastert taught at the high school for about 16 years before leaving in the early 1980s to launch his political career.

One of the victims, identified in court documents as "Individual D," told prosecutors that Hastert "put a 'Lazyboy'-type chair in direct view of the shower stalls in the locker room where he sat while the boys showered."

Richter, a sidekick on Conan O'Brien's TV show on TBS, said in a series of posts on Twitter that he remembers the chair.

"I went to Yorkville HS '80-'84 & I remember this chair. Purportedly 'to keep boys from fighting,'" Richter posted.

...Hastert, 74, pleaded guilty in October to one count of illegally structuring bank withdrawals. In the new court filing, prosecutors detail how the bank fraud was part of a scheme by the former lawmaker to pay off one of his alleged victims. It also details the other alleged incidents in which Hastert molested or committed sexual acts on boys in his charge.

The statutes of limitation on the sexual misconduct allegations have expired, but prosecutors raised the alleged wrongdoing in their pre-sentencing memo ahead of Hastert's scheduled sentencing later this month.

The former speaker faces up to six months in prison.

He was raping boys as young as 14.

CAUTION! If You've Been Talking With "Top Man!" On Grindr, You've Got A Closeted GOP Freak On Your Hands

In 2010, California state Senator Roy Ashbury, a leader of the most contemptibly aggressive gay haters in the state legislature, was outed. Patt Morrison interviewed him for KPCC immediately after he was busted, drunk, with a young male prostitute in his car. Listening to Morrison's interview made me sad for Ashbury and for all the GOP closet queens that infest our political system.

For decades you worked so hard to keep your sexual orientation under wraps. This must have been a torment, but in another sense, was there an element of relief?

I'm sensing relief now. I had not consciously decided to come out, but there's no doubt looking back that I had become increasingly bold about attending gay events, like pride festivals, and going to dance clubs and bars. Last year I attended Las Vegas Pride and San Diego Pride.

Were you looking over your shoulder?

A little more in San Diego than Las Vegas.

...At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind-- the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press-- at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

You worked for members of Congress, then were elected to public office yourself from Kern County. Were your sexual preferences in the back of your mind, or did you just go about your business?

The answer is both yes and no. I was married and had children. And I had a career and a passion. I also had a huge secret. But given my circumstances and my responsibilities, it wasn't an overwhelming issue for me. The desires were always there, but my focus was primarily on-- well, pretty selfishly-- on me and my career and my family.

Barry Goldwater had a gay grandson and didn't think government had any business in anybody's bedroom. But the recent brand of Republicanism has championed anti-gay issues.

I truly believe the conservative philosophy as embraced by Goldwater: that the government has no role in the private lives of the citizens. In the 1980s, there was a coming together of the religious right and the Goldwater right, sort of a marriage of convenience. It propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan never repudiated that but-- this is just my view-- I don't think he really embraced it either. In no way do I want to put down people of strong religious convictions; I happen to have very strong religious beliefs myself. But it was a merger of those two, and the religious [right's issues] were about same-sex rules, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun rights, these sort of core, litmus-test issues.

Did you feel uneasy with that combination? You did help to organize and speak at a rally in 2005 against a legislative bill sanctioning same-sex marriage.

How I ever got into that is beyond me. I was very uncomfortable with that, and I told one of my confidantes, "I'm never doing that again." It was not what I wanted to do, it wasn't me, but I helped to organize and lent my name.

A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners.

The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

When it comes to marriage, I'm getting the feeling that you're mulling over whether government ought to be in the marriage license business at all.

It's a very complicated issue, marriage, but it seems to me that the government's role is to protect a civil contract, whether it's to purchase a home together, enter into whatever financial or legal arrangement, including marriage. The whole issue of marriage as a 5,000-year-old tradition, a religious context, a historical context-- what government's role is, is the sanctification of the legal bond. Then it seems to me a matter for a church or some other societal organization but not for government.

What have you been talking about with the gay groups you've been meeting with?

The same things we're talking about. I don't have an agenda. I don't have a plan. I don't have an expectation. I just want people to know who I am and what's in my heart. I kept that from people. I concealed it from everyone for almost all my life, so I'm [now] privileged to work with people from all aspects of life, including organizations devoted to advancing the rights of gay and lesbian and transgendered individuals.

Recently in the Senate you spoke in favor of a resolution calling on Congress to repeal "don't ask, don't tell."

For that day I knew I had to say something. I already had prepared what I was going to say about serving in the military, and I actually had it written out because I wanted to be precise. But I had to preface it with something else, to give context to why all this time in elective office and being so deeply hidden, why was I now standing and speaking on this subject matter, and so I did.

...You're divorced, with four daughters and grandchildren. So here's where I ask about your family, and you can tell me to buzz off.

The things we're talking about were my choices. It was my choice to keep it secret; it was my choice to be a gay man and be married and have children. It was my choice to build a life on lies in order to conceal myself. That obviously had a big effect on my marriage and my children in ways that I don't fully comprehend, but it's my responsibility and not something to be talked about in interviews.

North Dakota state Rep Randy Boehning (R-Fargo), a 52-year-old homophobic closet case, isn't in the closet any longer. He says he's relieved to have been outed because he no longer has to lie to the world about who he is. He was outed because he sends dick shots to young men on Grindr.

State Rep. Randy Boehning, a 52-year-old Republican legislator from Fargo, says a Capitol employee told him a fellow lawmaker vowed to out him as gay if he continued to vote against bills granting gays legal protections against discrimination.

Boehning refused to identify at this point who he believes is behind the purported political payback for his vote against Senate Bill 2279, the third such bill defeated in the past six years by North Dakota legislators.

The exchange came to light when Dustin Smith, a 21-year-old Bismarck man with no known connections to the Capitol, contacted The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead earlier this month, saying he recognized Boehning from a gay dating smartphone app called Grindr. Chatting under the user name Top Man!, Boehning sent Smith sexually suggestive messages and, in the early morning hours of March 12, an unsolicited photo of his penis, according to exchanges reviewed by The Forum.

"How can you discriminate against the person you're trying to pick up?" Smith said in a recent interview.

When first questioned about the messages two weeks ago, Boehning declined to comment on whether he sent the explicit photo and messages.

But on Saturday he confirmed he was Top Man! and said he doesn't think sending a graphic photo of himself to a stranger is a lapse in judgment, as Grindr is an adult site where users often exchange such images.

"That's what gay guys do on gay sites, don't they?" Boehning said. "That's how things happen on Grindr. It's a gay chat site. It's not the first thing you do on that site. That's what we do, exchange pics on the site."

Boehning, who is not married, said there are people who know he is gay, but many of his family members and friends do not. He said Saturday he is also attracted to women and was relieved to come out because he no longer has to worry about being outed.

"The 1,000-pound gorilla has been lifted," he said. "I have to confront it at some point."

...Outing closeted gay politicians who cast votes seen as anti-gay is divisive in the gay community and has many critics. But while Smith and Boschee said they regret that Boehning was forced to come out of the closet, they believe it points out an important discrepancy between Boehning's vote and his personal life.

For his part, Boehning said coming out under these circumstances was both a personal relief and a political struggle.

"This has been a challenge for me," Boehning said. "You don't tell everyone you're going to vote one way and then switch your vote another way-- you don't have any credibility that way."

Boehning, a self-employed general contractor, said he has voted against multiple attempts to extend protected-class status to include sexual orientation because he doesn't believe his south Fargo constituents support it. Also, he has problems with the bill's language, which would protect people who are "perceived" to be gay.

If "perceived" was removed from the bill, he might vote in favor of it, he said.

Asked whether he would be personally concerned about being discriminated against in the areas of housing, workplace or public accommodation, Boehning, who lives in a rented Fargo apartment, said landlords have the right to do as they see fit.

He said many members of the Legislature find themselves allying and clashing on a variety of issues, regardless of party.

"Politics makes strange bedfellows," he said.

Lindsey Graham's Homosexuality And... Syria

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is, in essence, one thing above all else-- a self-loathing, closeted homosexual whose fear of exposure motivates everything else in his miserable life. Lindsey Graham should not be in the Senate or in government service at all. He is obsessed with his own homosexuality. His life in the dark, dank closet, trembling with fear that "the rednecks" will find out, has made him a practiced liar and has stoked a severe mental illness. He doesn't know the truth from the lies any longer. Last week we saw the tremendous damage this gay person is doing to the LGBT community in the hope of diverting attention away from himself.

I quoted from the apology to the LGBT community that rabidly homophobic closet case Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) made soon after he was arrested for drunk driving with a young male prostitute in his car. Ashburn came to grips with what went wrong in his life much faster than any outed Republican hate-monger I had ever seen. From his public statement:

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind — the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press — at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

...The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

And that's, basically, what the deluded voted of South Carolina sends to the U.S. Senate to represent them.

Right now there's a battle over the future of Syria raging on many fronts. In Brussels, for example, Britain, Turkey and France want to arm the "moderates" (of which there are none to base a policy on, unless you define "moderate" as someone opposing Assad). The war-mongery British Foreign Secretary, an adjunct of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex, is arguing that arming "moderate" opposition forces would lead to less killing in Syria. Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden are being more logical and argued the opposite, saying that arms supplies would only escalate the conflict.

"How would the government prevent British-supplied weapons falling into the wrong hands, and how does supplying weapons help to secure a lasting peace?" asked Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary.

"Syria today is awash with arms and in the House of Commons this week, MPs on all sides expressed real concern about the identity, intent and tactics of some of the rebel forces. "In Washington, the prime minister clearly failed to convince President Obama of his case, so tomorrow in Brussels the UK's use of the veto would confirm that the prime minister had also failed to convince our European partners."

...Oxfam's head of arms control, Anna Macdonald, said: "Allowing the EU arms embargo to end could have devastating consequences. There are no easy answers when trying to stop the bloodshed in Syria, but sending more arms and ammunition clearly isn't one of them.

"Transferring more weapons to Syria can only exacerbate a hellish scenario for civilians. If the UK and France are to live up to their own commitments-- including those set out in the new arms trade treaty-- they simply must not send weapons to Syria."

So why is this relevant to a discussion of Lindsey Graham's sad life in the closet? As always, Graham is asserting himself on the side of endless war, hoping the phony-baloney macho demeanor will somehow throw people off the scent. Last month he was shrill in his demands that the U.S. get involved with another complex Middle Eastern War dating back to ethnic rivalries that began in the Bronze Age. On CBS; Face the Nation he predicted that without U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war, the entire region will "fall into chaos" by the end of the year. Graham falsely claims that he fought in the Gulf War but, in fact, was an Army paper-pusher who never left the safety of South Carolina. He uses his bogus claims of military heroism and hardship to make himself seem "straight" (or the red neck conception of straight) and to bolster his flimsy credentials as a foreign policy expert. If skipping around Baghdad in the shadow of John McCain-- buying "darling little rugs" in a market-- makes Graham an expert, well that's the only thing that does. Lindsey Graham will never be elected president or vice president-- or anything outside of laughable South Carolina. He should stop pretending.

Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are pounding their fists for intervention in Syria after reports of chemical weapons being used. They have called for bombing Syrian air bases, arming the rebels and readying an international force to secure chemical weapons stocks. McCain was quick to say, though, he did not want American boots on the ground because that would be “the worst thing the United States could do right now.”

Although McCain and Graham hide under the pretense of humanitarian intervention and securing national interests, they are paving the way for another war in the Middle East. Bombing Syrian air bases to create a no-fly zone would have little effect on saving civilian lives. The Syrian Air Force has 555 combat capable aircrafts, but they have not been used against civilians. Helicopter gunships have attacked civilians, but an NFZ would have to be far more extensive to protect against them. Unlike regular aircrafts, helicopters can quickly depart, attack, and land necessitating more surveillance and striking capabilities to remove them.

Moreover, as Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations explains, “the NFZ in Libya did not protect civilian populations; it was actually the use of close air support against Qaddafi regime forces on the ground.” Close air support (CAS) requires trusted intelligence agents and forward air controllers on the ground to protect civilians and attack regime assets. That is, Western boots would have to be on the ground to actually secure civilian populations.

Additionally, General James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, told Congress that Syria has advanced air defense weapons from Russia that would make it difficult to establish any NFZ. Also consider that Libya’s no-fly zone required a 7-month long bombing campaign. Syria’s army is much stronger than Libya’s was, and its cities are denser than Libya’s which increases the possibility of civilian collateral damage.

Next, arming the rebels will only prolong the conflict and further ignite religious fragmentation. The Syrian army is well-equipped and has much better training than the rebels. If rebels gain heavy weaponry, Assad’s forces could escalate their own attacks or further drive moderates to pick a side. Weapons can also be traded from group to group. Attempts may be made to transfer weapons to "secular" or "moderate" groups, but they could easily end up in the hands of Jubhat Al-Nasra, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda in Syria. Previous disastrous experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia should be enough to swear off the idea of funneling arms to proxies.

Involving American forces in Syria will also antagonize Russia, who is providing arms and supplies to Assad. At a time when Iran is developing nuclear weapons and North Korea is more belligerent than ever, it would be diplomatically foolish to isolate a powerhouse like Russia.

Graham is a sick, bloodthirsty sociopath hoping against hope that he isn't exposed for his true nature. The Democrat running against him for the South Carolina Senate seat, Jay Stamper, never comments of the closet case thing. But he has been very vocal about Lindsey's warmongering.

[T]he main reason we should all care about retiring Lindsey Graham is the carelessness with which he advocates the use of American military force abroad. There is something disturbing about someone who has never seen combat being so consistently eager to deploy other people’s sons and daughters overseas. Maybe that’s why he has falsely and repeatedly claimed to be a Gulf War veteran.

I believe that Graham may be one of those people who appreciates our military’s capabilities and are frustrated when they aren’t being employed. It’s like having a brand new sports car in your garage all gassed up, the keys in the ignition, but not being able to take it for a spin.

Having voted to authorize the use of force in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was Graham not chastened when these two wars left over 100,000 civilians and U.S. soldiers dead or wounded and our economy on life support. Did he consider resigning, maybe to write a memoir in the hope that we could at least learn from his mistakes. At the very least, did he shy away from any future discussion of foreign policy. No-- not Lindsey. Instead, he’s weighing in on Syria. After reviewing all the facts, he’s come to a conclusion that we need boots on the ground and we need to bomb the country with cruise missiles.

There are so many ways this can backfire. Cornering Assad with U.S. force would make it more likely-- not less-– that he would resort to using chemical weapons out of desperation. The Arab proverb is “an enemy of my enemy is my friend” and intervening would make us friends with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida. We could end up spending money and American lives replacing a brutal dictatorship with a radical theocracy. Lindsey actually wants us to arm fractured rebel groups, many of whom have already committed war crimes. Their empowerment would risk the disintegration of any central government and could turn Syria into a sort of lawless failed state like Somalia, even more of a refuge for terrorists than it is currently. Not to know how wrongheaded it is to intervene is to ignore the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and also to ignore the complexity of the Syrian situation, which virtually guarantees undesired and unintended consequences.

Lindsey, can you look into the eyes of these troops, or their parents, and honestly tell them that deploying on a mission to Syria has a high probability of making Americans safer, advancing the interests of the United States or contributing to regional stability in the Middle East? In fact, intervening in the crisis will not do any of these things.

Can you look into the eyes of the veterans of past wars who are disabled and homeless and tell them they just need to wait longer to get the help they need because we need those billions of dollars to fight yet another war? And how can we claim to support the troops when we send them to war and forget when they get home, voting to cut benefits for people who risked everything to serve our country?

Has Lindsey Graham thought about how $1.4 trillion in war spending could have been used to improve people’s lives? We could have increased funding for the National Institutes of Health by 600% every year for the last 10 years, speeding the development of treatments and cures for cancer, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, MS, and countless other diseases that destroy more lives every year than any Islamic terrorist could dream of. We could have provided low-income healthcare to 70 million people for 10 years, or hired an additional 2 million public elementary school teachers for 10 years. We could have provided 17 million military veterans VA medical care for 10 years, or provided 4-year university scholarships to 40 million students.

Don’t let Lindsey Graham (or anyone else) question your patriotism because you disagree with his foreign policy views. This is a senator who single-handedly blocked President Obama’s popular choice for Defense Secretary-- not out of principled opposition-- but to gain leverage over the President on a completely unrelated issue. As a result, the United States was without a Secretary of Defense at a time of escalating tensions overseas.

If you'd like to lend a hand in helping replace Lindsey Graham with Jay Stamper, you can do it on the Blue America Senate 2014 page.