The Next Likely Use of the Bob Allen Defense
All the pieces are there; right-wing gonzo commentator and fundamentalist minister Doug Giles is a sure bet to be the next incarnation of the Ted Haggard syndrome and employer of the Bob Allen defense for justifying soliciting sex in a public bathroom. The guy spends a lot of his time worrying about the "homosexual agenda," of course, but his latest confession of his terrible fear of black men seals the deal as far as I can tell.
That last piece of the puzzle comes in the course of a recent screed against a Dutch cleric who dared suggest that Jehovah could just as well be called Allah. For the record, I don't give a toss what anybody chooses to call their invisible omnipotent faerie-friend in the sky, but there was a comment in Giles' diatribe that was so telling that I couldn't just let it pass:
...of course Catholics in Indonesia are going to call God ‘Allah’—there are two of them and 234,693,997 Muslims. I’m guessin’ that the Catholics over there are pissing their pants.Mmmmmm, whiff that racist fear, replete with the additional passing reference to an act that usually happens in the bathroom but, in this case, is cast as a source of embarrassment? Remember all the riots and attacks on Caucasians after Malcolm X? I don't, either, but apparently Giles sure is frightened of something. Maybe it's his own fetish? Compare this to Bob Allen's recent comments about feeling so scared of some black men in a park that his only reasonable course of action was to offer one of them $20 to allow Allen to perform oral sex on him:
I bet they’re feeling the same way I felt when I, the only white dude in a full theater, saw the movie Malcolm X the first day it was released. When asked by a rather large, pigment-blessed patron as the credits were rolling if I liked the film, I said, “of course I liked it. Whitey is the devil—and could you point me to the nearest well-lit exit?”...
He felt intimidated by the "stocky black guy" in the restroom (whom he didn't know was an officer) and several other "stocky black guys" sitting in the park (also, apparently, plain-clothes officers) and thought he was about to be robbed, Allen said. The officer first mentioned oral sex for money, and Allen simply went along with discussing the transaction to avoid becoming a "statistic," he said...
— (Source)
Anybody care to start a betting pool on this guy? I don't know a thing about his sex life and I don't particularly want to, but if I were Giles' wife I'd be keeping a close eye on the public restrooms and masseur bills. After all, the protestations in some of his previous columns are just too damned precious. As a straight man, I've never felt the need to justify my own sexual inclinations to anyone else, homosexual or otherwise, nor felt as if it were important that I understand theirs. It's not something I spend a lot of time wondering about it; my predilections are what they are, and so are everyone else's. Most of the men and women I've known, of whatever sexual stripe they might have been, conduct themselves similarly if they have an ounce of security in their own identity. The few men I've known before they came out as gay later in life were invariably the ones who spent a lot of time wondering about and attempting to justify things they didn't really feel to everyone else — without a single exception I can think of. Granted, my sample size is only about a half dozen in this regard, but Giles' protestations, both about race and about orientation, sound very, very familiar.So, what do you think? Six months? A year? A week? When will Giles be found entertaining Captain Chocolate with his candlestick in the boys' room, a la Bob Allen?
Disclaimer: Again, whatever you're into, you're into. Spewing silly screeds about yourself just makes it more obvious and makes you look like a big, fat hypocrite. Isn't that right, Reverend Haggard?
