Andrew Sullivan:
 Unconscious Collaborator?

ndrew Sullivan, neo-conservative author, openly gay practicing Roman Catholic and unconscious collaborator with anti-gay bigots, pontificated last Tuesday, much to his own detriment, about a teenager’s murder. He spoke on ABC-TV’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

  A British ex-patriot, Mr. Sullivan has been a frequent guest on major network talk shows due to his former standing as an openly gay editor-in-chief of The New Republic, a political journal. Growing numbers of activists today have regularly expressed their exasperation with Sullivan’s self-deprecating views on these talk shows, which often show him to be, they say, a well-intentioned but misdirected traitor to the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights.

  Sullivan, erroneously viewed by the popular press as a gay strategist, shamelessly supported claims, now being made by virulently anti-gay groups, that the media’s disinclination to cover the murder of a 13-year old Arkansas boy, Jesse Dirkhising, by two pedophiles, is evidence of American journalism’s political correctness when it comes to addressing male-on-male sex crimes.

  One of the pedophiles, in fact, had also planned to murder a girl, a 10-year-old neighbor according to ABC. He might better, many say, have been described as a pedophile with murderous predilections.

  Peter Jennings of ABC’s World News Tonight rightly explained that "there are many journalists, including people on this broadcast, who feel that this (Dirkhising) case, in itself, did not merit national attention."

  Mr. Sullivan, who represents, in this reporter’s opinion, a terribly flawed moral judgment, would momentarily be shown disagreeing with and defaming the work of his many colleagues in the media.

Mr. Jennings next noted how anti-gay groups throughout the country have been focused for months on the national media’s disinclination to publicize Dirkhising’s murder, but that their far-right claims had been ignored until their position "was embraced by one of the country’s most provocative gay writers…Andrew Sullivan."

  Sullivan, in advance, had proudly promoted his ABC Dirkhising debut on his Web site. He was featured on World News Tonight giving his opinion of the teen’s killing:

  According to Aaron Brown of ABC News New York: "The fuel propelling this (Sullivan) argument (asks) why so much (media) coverage for (Matthew) Shepard and so little for (Jesse) Dirkhising?"

  This unseemly comparison between pedophiles’ rape and murder and a horrendous hate crime highlights the confusion of the moral issues involved. By voicing such sentiments Sullivan appears to have undermined any stature he once enjoyed as a legitimate GLBT community representative.

  Ms. Martha Moore, of USA Today was chosen by ABC to reply to Sullivan’s tripe. She said:

  "For a crime story or a murder—even a horrific or sad one like Jesse Dirkhising’s, I think there has to be an issue of larger social significance attached to it."

  The ABC news reporter backed up Ms. Moore’s journalistic stance. He said:

  "In Shepard, the issue was hate crime laws and whether they should extend to gays.

  In Dirkhising, the media saw a terrible crime, but no greater issue."

  While Mr. Brown admitted that such a decision might seem cold, he also explained:

  "Countless rapes and murders—gay and straight—go unreported all the time exactly for that reason."

  Thus, for most of the national media, including the Washington Post, USA Today and World News Tonight, said the ABC report, the decision to avoid the Dirkhising murder was "easy, logical and routine."

  Sadly, Andrew Sullivan approached it instead as a gay misdeed deliberately ignored. A Sunday New York Times Magazine article was written last year by Sullivan, celebrating how he’d found anti-gay fundamentalist religionists—in groups-- to be likable people. It figures.

  Some say the nation’s media ought now to re-think Andrew Sullivan and, perhaps, to ignore him.

Oral Majority Online: www.oralmajorityonline.com

Jack Nichols is the author of The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus Books, 1996) Of Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin Books, 1975) and of Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove and The Pines (St. Martin’s Press, 1976)