Lindsey Graham: Immigration hypocrite?

“Confirmed-bachelor” GOP Senator Lindsey Graham (R-Closet), who has no plans to marry Ricky Martin, is having the vapors over President Obama’s push to include a fix for binational gay couples in the immigration reform debate.

As you know, the legal marriages of gay couples are not recognized by the federal government because of the DOMA law. Therefore, the non-American spouses of gay Americans risk deportation as their marriage is not a path towards getting a green card and subsequent citizenship. And it’s causing real harm to gay families.

Senate Democratic negotiators Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Bob Menendez and Michael Bennet threw gays under the bus in order to reach an immigration compromise with Republicans who were desperate for any deal in order to save their party from permanent minority status.

President Obama, to his credit, included a fix for binational married gay couples in his immigration reform principles yesterday. Obama’s proposal has now upset one of the Senate’s biggest drama queens, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), whose long-time unmarried status, and fey demeanor, has made him a subject of ongoing speculation regarding his own ambiguous sexual orientation.

For a staunch family values advocate, Lindsey Graham is oddly disinterested in having a family of his own, or even in expressing any interest whatsoever in the opposite sex. Lindsey Graham is what I like to call a “closeted heterosexual.” His heterosexuality is buried so deeply that it never seems to manifest itself, and he never seems to want to talk about it; something rather unique for actual heterosexuals. Thus he is Lindsey Graham (R-Closet).

Why discuss Lindsey Graham’s sexual orientation at all?

Were Lindsey Graham gay, his hypocrisy in constantly bashing gays legislatively (Graham consistently has little better than a zero rating from HRC), while being a closeted homosexual, is something that many in the gay community, myself included, would consider fair game for public discussion. While it’s one thing to protect gays in the closet who are doing no public harm to their own community, it is quite another to permit someone who is themselves gay from repeatedly causing harm to millions of gay Americans.

So while the jokes about “Miss Lindsey” are cute, and in my view fair-game, they are also deadly serious. Lindsey Graham needs to come out with a better explanation as to why a 57-year-old man, who works in one of the biggest old-boy back-slappin’ girl-lovin’ environments in the country (I worked on the Hill, and US Senators are hardly a celibate bunch), and who, frankly, sounds and carries himself gayer than any gay man I know, never shows any interest in women, yet has a very strong interest in bashing others who share his apparent disinterest in the opposite sex.

Real people’s lives and families are involved and at stake here. And it’s time we stopped treating southern bigots like Lindsey Graham with kid gloves. If Lindsey Graham wants to continue demonizing our relationships, then he puts his relationships, or lack thereof, on the table as well.