Girl, it’s raining MEN!

Not just men: Gay men! Sodomites! Flippin’ Freakin’ Q*U*E*E*R*S!

And the women of Golconda — that town in Magritte’s painting where it’s always raining what look like stockbrokers — the women are totally losing it. They are going around that final bend. They are — in a word — concerned.

Sisters in alarm with our very own Betty Crocker division of professional homophobes, the Concerned Women of America.

Yes, these are hard days for the haters.

Between the WWE wrestler who came out on National Coming Out Day (Chris Kanyon, left), and the formerly married men who swamp New Jersey ex-governor Jim (“I am a gay American“) McGreevey at book signings to tell him how much his public coming out inspired them to shed their own misguided marriages and live openly, often with male partners — these are hard days indeed.

And we haven’t even mentioned the fear and trembling in a certain white house handling its very own, richly deserved instant-karma kind of scandal.

It makes you wonder, though. What is really behind the institutional fear and loathing of homosexuality.

The Bible, we suspect, is just a handy excuse. The Bible, as it happens, is out of step in many places with civilized notions of sexual propriety. An example that comes quickly to mind is the story of Lot. Among other things, Lot’s daughters get the old man drunk and have sex with him — these were the same dear daughters he offered to the mob in Sodom for deflowerment. He felt he would be failing as a host if handed over the heavenly guests, whom the crowd wanted. Hospitality, we think, can go too far.

And despite the Levitical interdictions against pork and shellfish, none of our right reverends are passing on the rib platters or the shrimp cocktails. (Have you seen the size on Falwell lately?)

So what’s up with the by-the-book condemnations of man-on-man and girl-on-girl?

In an in-depth essay on the Foley scandal — yes, him again — law professor Dale Carpenter takes a look at the inner gears of homophobia against the backdrop of “a political party hoist on its own petard of anti-homosexual moralism and opportunism” :

The Foley mess reaffirms some things we have long known about the nature and characteristics of anti-gay prejudice.

William Eskridge, a Yale law professor, has written that anti-gay prejudice has been marked historically by three characteristics. These are:

1. “hysterical demonization of gay people as dirty sexualized subhumans”
2. “obsessional fears of gay people as conspiratorial and sexually predatory”
3. “narcissistic desires to reinforce stable heterosexual identity . . . by bashing gay people.”

The primary historical traits of homophobia are thus hysteria, obsession, and narcissism.

We can see the first of these characteristics, hysteria, in some of the reactions to the Foley scandal. “While pro-homosexual activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two,” declared Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

There is no good evidence of a link between homosexual orientation and pedophilia. Professional anti-homosexuals, like Perkins, often cite junk science to support their hysterical views of dangerous and hypersexualized homosexuals.

Ken Lucas, a Democrat running for Congress from Kentucky, said that Republican leaders should have closely monitored Foley simply because he’s gay. There was no more reason to watch over Foley because he’s gay than there was to supervise the other 530 or so members of Congress because they’re straight, but hysteria sees no inconsistency.

The second characteristic of anti-gay prejudice, obsession, has been on full display. Some Republicans in Congress and religious conservatives told reporters that they suspect a “gay subculture” has infiltrated the party. This “Velvet Mafia” — as some have called it — allegedly consists of a number of gay Republican congressional staffers and other personnel. A conservative website asserted that the gay conspiracy includes nine chiefs of staff, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications for prominent congressional Republicans. …

This baseless fear of a gay mafia wielding enormous power undetected has a certain obsessional quality. It is deeply conspiratorial, fed by fantasies of gays as sexual predators.

Others — including Perkins, Newt Gingrich, Patrick Buchanan, and even the Wall Street Journal editorial page — suggested that Republican leaders were paralyzed from acting against Foley early on by fear of a pro-gay backlash. To believe this of GOP leaders — who have opposed every measure for gay equality — requires obsessional and conspiratorial delusion about the power and influence of the gay civil rights movement in America.

Finally, the Foley mess has demonstrated the third characteristic of anti-gay prejudice, narcissism. If the GOP loses one or both houses of Congress in November, one supposed lesson will be that the party was too lenient on homosexuals — turning off the party’s base of religious conservatives. Some thus see the scandal as a chance to cleanse the GOP of the impurity of homosexuality, to reassert the party’s stable, pro-family heterosexual identity.

In his concluding sentence, Carpenter cuts to the heart of what this scandal has really been about (and why Nightcharm has pounded away at it so repeatedly):

“The Foley scandal doesn’t say anything very important about America’s gays. But it says a lot about America’s anti-gays.”