| My hankies are drenched, my weeping couch a sodden raft. The deluge that Hurricane Charley dumped across Florida was a puddle compared with the titanic swells clogging America's tear ducts in the wake of New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey's monumentally brave confession: "I am a gay American."
Great God above, can there be a tomorrow?
To hear and read reaction to McGreevey's announcement that he'll resign (one of these days), you'd think he'd done something heroic, a self-made martyr deserving of admiration rather than a corrupt individual forced to face the music.
So he's gay. Who cares?
The gist of those clamoring for Kleenex is that McGreevey had to lead a double life because of his gayness, a duplicitous lifestyle inflicted on him by an intolerant culture.
We are to believe that his adultery and his misuse of public funds to employ his lover are products not of his corrupt character but, alas, of life's unfairness.
Have you noticed you can never find a Stradivarius when you need one?
McGreevey's promised resignation was appropriate under the circumstances ? obviously ? but not because he's gay. It's appropriate because he betrayed the voters' trust and misspent public funds while potentially endangering lives.
He hired his reported boyfriend, Golan Cipel, an Israeli national, to fill the $110,000-a- year job of homeland-security advisor, touting the fellow's military and diplomatic experience. Cipel's exact qualifications for the job were that he'd served in the Israeli Navy and wrote some press releases for the Israeli Consulate in New York.
For comparison, the security advisor to New York Gov. George Pataki is the former head of the FBI's New York office. In New Jersey, which lost almost 900 people in the 9/11 attacks, former FBI director Louis Freeh offered to serve as security advisor for no pay, according to Newsweek.
Supporting a lover at taxpayer expense while serving in public office is generally frowned upon regardless of the players' sexual orientation. That's the breach, not adultery, which barely bestirs American voters these days. That's the outrage, not McGreevey's gayness.
The fact that McGreevey confessed his homosexuality when Cipel, now his former boyfriend, threatened a sexual-harassment lawsuit thus looks more like a mask than a facing-up to a "unique truth," as McGreevey described his "outing."
It is ludicrous, besides, to suggest that being gay is an obstacle to personal growth and expression in our "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" culture. The only way we could be any gay-friendlier would be to pipe show tunes into interstate rest stops.
Even so, McGreevey's confession has been received with gravitas worthy of a St. Augustine.
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