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Culture wars come to Metro

Friday, June 23, 2006

Fifteen years ago, during the heyday of local access cable TV, Montgomery County had its own news channel complete with reporters, news teams, a mobile unit and nightly news broadcasts.

Bruce DePuyt, one of the news reporters, decided to create a weekly political talk show called ‘‘21 This Week” and invited me to be one of the panelists (I was the angry white guy). When DePuyt left, I replaced him as the show’s producer and moderator for the next 10 years. To fill my spot on the panel I contacted a guy who’d just lost a House of Delegates race — Bob Smith.

I’d never met Smith but he was an instant hit on the show because he was intelligent, witty, well-informed and loved mixing it up with the liberal panelists. His conservatism was more Catholic than Republican. As a practicing Roman Catholic, he strongly opposed both abortion and the death penalty. And he favored gun control, which cost him that 1994 Republican primary election (the NRA did a mailing against him).

When I left the show in 2002, Casey Aiken took over and Bob stayed on. A year later Gov. Robert Ehrlich appointed Smith to the Metro board — the regional mass transit authority that runs Metrorail and Metrobus.

Then, last week, Smith’s talk show world and Metro board world collided. During a talk show debate on gay marriage, Smith referred to homosexuals as ‘‘persons of sexual deviancy,” a comment he made regularly during the 10 years I was on the show. But this time Rich Madaleno, a state legislator and homosexual activist, was watching and sent a show tape to D.C. Councilman Jim Graham, another homosexual activist who, like Smith, serves on the Metro board.

Graham decided to ambush Smith at the next Metro board meeting. He tipped off the press, issued an embargoed press statement and then, in the middle of a budget discussion, demanded that Smith either disavow his comments or resign from the board.

‘‘Right,” Smith said to himself. ‘‘I’m really going to disavow my 47 years of Catholic upbringing.” So Smith stuck to his guns — or, more aptly, to his faith — no apology, no resignation.

But Governor Ehrlich, in the midst of a tricky re-election year and besieged daily by a hostile, biased media, cut Smith loose. The Baltimore Sun applauded Smith’s firing as necessary ‘‘to protect Metro’s 10,000 employees from potentially discriminating policies.” Huh? Potential policies? The only homosexual issues at Metro, so far, are pro-gay and anti-gay bus ads and Smith voted for both because he supports free speech. Likewise, he’s never challenged Metro’s anti-discrimination sexual orientation protections.

But let’s put aside the semantics as well as the obvious attempt by Delegate Madaleno and Councilman Graham (both Democrats) to set-up Ehrlich. And let’s put aside the upside-down logic that Smith is unfit to sit on the Metro board next to fellow-member Marion Barry, a convicted drug felon and accused tax evader. The real issue here is, at this point in the culture wars, what is permissible speech and what is impermissible speech, so serious it costs you your job?

If Smith said, ‘‘Blacks are lazy” or ‘‘Women are stupid,” then, no problem, off with his head. But homosexuality is different because the preponderance of American religions condemn homosexuality, specifically homosexual sex. They don’t condemn blacks and women.

So what happens when Bob Smith’s Catholic teachings collide with political correctness? When Bob Smith echoes a core tenant of America’s largest religion should he be treated like a — deviant? ‘‘Oh,” you say, ‘‘what about the wall between church and state?” Fine, but what about the First Amendment’s freedom of religious exercise? Must Catholics ‘‘disavow” their religious beliefs to hold public office? Who’s really being discriminated against here?

Catholic doctrine makes a critical distinction between being a homosexual (not a sin) and the homosexual sex act (an abomination against God). But does the American public agree?

Well, the nation’s collective morality is always in flux. And the law follows the culture. For instance, abortion, once a crime, is now a constitutionally protected right; racial apartheid, once established by law, is now prohibited by law; modesty, honesty and respect, once valued norms, have given way to Howard Stern.

So where are we with homosexuals? The Supreme Court’s recent Lawrence case striking down anti-sodomy laws seems to reflect the majority public view that homosexuals have a privacy right free from persecution or prosecution. And most people seem OK with the notion that homosexuals are part of God’s family, born to that status involuntarily.

But the homosexual lobby is desperately and relentlessly trying to parlay the public’s tolerance into the acceptance of homosexuality as normal. After all, if God made homosexuals then homosexuality must be normal, right? Sorry, just because God created you doesn’t mean you’re normal. God created pedophiles and serial killers, too.

On TV, in the movies and in our schools the gay lobby is spreading the ‘‘gay is good, gay is normal” message daily hoping to change public opinion. And if you resist you’re a bigoted ‘‘homophobe.” Fine, you decide, is one man having anal intercourse with another man normal or is it deviant behavior? Careful, you might lose your job!

Blair Lee is CEO of the Lee Development Group in Silver Spring and a regular commentator for WBAL radio. His column appears Fridays in The Gazette. His e-mail address is blair@ leedg.com.