Mar 04, 2005  |  By: Mubarak Dahi  | COMMENTS     

DOUG WEAD, A former friend and confidante of the president's, recently released a slew of tapes he secretly recorded of George W. Bush while he was gearing up for his first presidential bid.

The tapes uniquely capture Bush in moments of honest reflection as he contemplated a host of issues and policies as he was trying to stake out his positions on matters as divisive as gay rights and courting Christian conservatives.

The recordings are particularly fascinating because Bush, unaware that he was being recorded, was so utterly candid in his thoughts.

They've been devoured by the media and the public precisely because of the honesty they exude.

Every other public utterance parceled out by Bush, or any contemporary politician for that matter, is dissected for spin or political impact, is played out by pundits and political junkies and lobbyists in search of the ever-elusive "truth" behind the words.

The sincerity of these recorded statements do not seem to require such studying. Like so little else in politics, they seem to be faithful at face value.

On one level, it's simply captivating to listen to the president's early thoughts and compare his feelings then to how history played out, particularly given how he ended up using gay issues politically in the past election.

But more importantly, gay rights advocates should listen to Bush's early, more generous, thoughts about gay rights and try to figure out where we as a movement lost the president.

Even more urgently, gay rights leaders should try to figure out just how much of Bush's early sentiments on gays hold true, and whether his thoughts on who we are and how he should deal with us can be better exploited in the future.

GEORGE W. BUSH will never be mistaken for a gay-rights advocate. Early on, as revealed in the tapes, Bush was an opponent of gay marriage.

"Gay marriage, I am against that," he said. "Special rights, I am against that."

It seems clear that his mindset was that at least some gay rights were synonymous to "special" rights, rather than equal rights or civil rights. However, the tapes suggest that, early on at least, the president was not particularly gung-ho to be anti-gay.

After meeting with James Robison, an influential Texas evangelical minister, Bush was recorded saying, "I think he wants me to attack homosexuals."

Bush seemed uncomfortable with that idea. "This is an issue I have been trying to downplay," Bush went on to say. "I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays."

His reasoning for not wanting to attack gays, however, shows that Bush's thinking was mired in religious ideology rather than progressing along the lines of civil rights.
"I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner," Bush said. "How can I differentiate sin?"

Regardless of his personal opinions, Bush apparently had a solid grasp of how the Christian right viewed homosexuals. After reading an aide's report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, Bush surmised, "This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuals, however."

In retrospect, those words seem eerily prescient, even cruelly ironic. That understanding of the deep-seated fear by the Christian right of homosexuals was a guiding principle that Bush used in the 2004 election to whip this part of his constituency into a voting fervor.

Many pundits, rightly or wrongly, have credited his tactic of playing on fear of homosexuals as perhaps the key reason he was able to win a second term as president.

IN STUDYING BUSH'S comments, it isn't enough for us as gays to dismiss the discrepancy between Bush's apparent beliefs and his eventual actions as the calloused and calculating tactics of a cynical politician.

There's no doubt that Bush early on identified the evangelical fear and loathing of gays as a hot political point. And there can be little doubt that Bush and his advisers cashed in on that understanding to motivate the right-wingers to get out to the voting booths this past election.

But we also need to ask ourselves some hard questions about our own mistakes. And we need to figure out if Bush might still be approachable and open to being the less anti-gay political leader the tapes suggest he at one time wanted to be.

We have to wonder if the gay leadership missed an opportunity to sway the president at one or more critical junctures as he developed his ideology on gay rights.

The tapes also show that, early on, Bush was cautious of courting conservative Christians and evangelicals, ...