Monday, July 09, 2012
According to published reports, when Larry Brinkin was
arrested two weeks ago, the police found “images of year-old infants subjected
to sodomy and oral sex, and perverse racial comments (Brinkin’s email: ‘I loved
especially the 2 year old n----- getting nailed. Hope you’ll continue so I can
see what the little blond b---- is going to get. White Power! White Supremacy!
White D--- Rules!’).” Yet the media has barely reported this terribly
disturbing incident.
But, you ask, who was Larry Brinkin? He was “a central
figure in the gay rights movement,” a man who was so influential that, “The San
Francisco board of supervisors actually gave a ‘Larry Brinkin Week’ in February
2010 upon his retirement.” It was Brinkin who first used the term “domestic
partnerships” in a legal dispute, marking a watershed moment in gay activist
history, yet news of his alleged crimes against infants and children, not to
mention his alleged White Supremacist leanings, has received very little media
attention.
Is there a double standard here? Imagine what the media
would be doing if Brinkin had been a conservative Christian leader.
When evangelical leader Ted Haggard fell, the media was
quick to pounce, suggesting that this exposed the corrupt nature of evangelical
Christianity as a whole. And media leaders have done this repeatedly whenever
there has been a scandal connected to an evangelical (or Catholic) leader, and
the news is blared from the headlines. But where, I ask you, is the outrage or
the front page news when a gay leader commits atrocities such as those
allegedly committed by Larry Brinkin? And why isn’t the media claiming that
Brinkin’s transgressions expose the corrupt nature of gay activism as a whole?
The failure of a Christian leader is considered endemic
and representative; the failure of a gay leader is considered an aberrant
exception. Why the unequal treatment?
Personally, I do believe that ministry leaders should be
held to high standards, and if we fall short in a serious, public way, we
deserve the disappointment (and even scorn) that comes with it. After all, we
are supposed to be moral and spiritual examples, even serving as faithful
representatives of Jesus, and we have no business preaching morality while living
in immorality. And while I absolutely believe in God’s mercy and the
possibility of restoration (we all need His mercy), I do agree that the stakes
are high and that there will often be heavy fallout when a prominent Christian
leader sins in a serious and public way.
My question, though, has to do with Larry Brinkin, who
allegedly enjoyed watching infants as they were being sexually abused (yes,
infants!). Where is the national indignation? Why isn’t the name of Larry
Brinkin on the lips of every news commentator in the nation? And why, two weeks
after his arrest, does a Google search for his name yield just 111,000 hits?
More importantly, why hasn’t his arrest caused the public to stand up and say,
“We must do something to stop the vicious exploitation of little children!”?
The answer is that Brinkin’s arrest has received
relatively little media attention because he was a gay activist leader, not a
conservative Christian leader, and there is no hiding the mainstream media’s
pro-gay, anti-conservative Christian bias. And because Brinkin’s arrest has not
been widely reported, the general public has not been confronted afresh with
the horrors of child pornography.
(On another note, there was a shocking case in England a
few years ago where social workers had evidence that a gay activist couple was
sexually abusing the boys in their foster care, but the social workers were
afraid to report the couple lest they be accused of homophobia. Not
surprisingly, the case received limited coverage in the UK and almost no
coverage here in the States. What if this had been a conservative Christian
foster care couple?)
To be sure, Ted Haggard was a better known figure than
Larry Brinkin, but there have been other Christian leaders of much less
notoriety than Haggard (like an otherwise unknown Catholic priest), and that
didn’t stop the media from making their failings into a national scandal.
Brinkin, for his part, was no smalltime player, with the San Francisco Examiner
describing him as an “iconic San Francisco gay activist who brought the
nation’s first domestic partnership lawsuit in 1982.” And he was, after all, a
respected, long-term leader within the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s
largest gay activist organization. Why hasn’t the HRC been tarred and feathered
the way evangelicals (or Catholics) are after one of their leaders falls? Why
the inconsistency?
To this day, the name of Ted Haggard, is used to mock
evangelical leaders (in the form of emails and comments we frequently receive,
telling us that we will be the next Ted Haggard) while the name of Larry
Brinkin is being forgotten as quickly as possible. Why the double standard?
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