Burnt Orange Report

Homosexual Man Chosen As Next Majority Leader?

By Damon McCullar

Update: Rep. Roy Blunt has been elected Majority Leader.

When it rains, it pours...

According to Blogactive.com the new "temporary" Republican Majority Leader is a homosexual.

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert (R-IL) has picked Representative David Drier (R-CA), a gay man, as his choice for House Majority Leader. Regular blogACTIVE Confidential readers recall that David Drier was a recipient of a blogACTIVE Roy Cohn Award for being a gay man who worked against gay people. Now, in his newly visible role, provided the House elects him, David Dreier will be in a position to finally put the Federal Marriage Amendment, which he opposed, to bed. No reaction from radical right groups yet on Hastert's pick -- we're assuming that he didn't check in with the Family Research council's ok on this.

There is also a story that ran in LA Weekly about the same subject, There is an excerpt from the article after the jump.

I have zero problems with a homosexual man being in Congress, but with the Republicans current strategy of using homosexuals as a wedge in campaign politics, I wonder if change is in the air? Could it be that now that DeLay is out of power "temporarily" the Republican party is going to have a shift on it's policy toward homosexuals? One could only hope.

From the LA Weekly story metioned in the main post:

Rogers' campaign against Dreier got a major boost when it was taken up by Raw Story, the hot new liberal gadfly newsblog. Raw Story, which is edited out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by 23-year-old John Byrne, who is also gay, last week published an interview with Dreier's Democratic opponent in 1998 and 2000, Dr. Janice Nelson, who said she was aware during her 2000 campaign that Dreier was living with his chief of staff, Brad Smith. "Brad was like an invisible presence," she said. "They really have the routine down slick."

Nelson, a professor of pathology, says she came forward when she read on Raw Story that Hustler, the Larry Flynt magazine, was working on an expos of Dreier's secret gay life. Mark Cromer, the mag's features editor in charge of its outing of Dreier, is a former reporter for a string of Valley newspapers in Dreier's district, including the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Pasadena Star-News. Cromer said his mags expose on Dreier, part of a package on sexual hypocrisy by Republican spear-carriers in the culture wars, will be published in November. And he accuses the papers in Dreier's district, all of which spout a conservative, anti-gay editorial line, of having a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward the congressman and his relationship with Smith. These papers are all owned by Media News Group (MNG), whose CEO, Dean Singleton, is a major contributor to Republican campaigns. Opinion pages editor Steve Scauzillo said he could not comment on the Dreier matter without the approval of MNG higher-ups.