Yes, you read the headline correctly. And, yes, it is apparently true. Mike Rogers at blogActive has the story. It also got picked up by the New York Daily News gossip column:
President Bush isn’t letting potential howls from the Christian right stop him from nominating an openly gay man as assistant secretary of commerce.
[He] has tapped longtime aide Israel Hernandez for the post, which also carries the title of director general of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service.
The 35-year-old Republican go-getter has been a Bush acolyte since the President’s 1994 campaign for governor of Texas. (Among Hernandez’s duties was supplying the candidate with breath mints, prompting Dubya to dub him “Altoid Boy.”)
Most recently, the graduate of Texas A&M’s George H.W. Bush School of Government served as aide-de-camp to senior White House adviser Karl Rove.
One source tells us Hernandez waited until Bush was sworn in for a second term to formally tell him he is gay. By then, says a source, he’d brought his partner to several official events.
At Hernandez’ confirmation hearing this week, when he was asked to introduce his family to the Senate candidate, he introduced everyone but his life partner. Can you say “self-loathing?”
It is beyond hypocritical – an obscenity, really – that any gay person could work for Rove and Bush as they stoke the fires of bigotry – not out of anything they themselves believe or even give a shit about – but specifically to energize their base of knuckle-dragging, homophobes. The whole thing is just plain evil.
This has nothing to do with flying rainbow flags. This is about self-respect, and the way we project that to the world.
Izzy’s deliberate failure to introduce his partner at his Senate hearings screams loudly and clearly that he’s ashamed of who he is. (And I’ll bet he still sleeping on the couch over that one.)
But that’s his problem. The fact that he colluded with Rove and Bush for the past 10 years as they loosed their dogs on gay people for utterly and purely political ends is another matter.
Obviously, if they’ve got Izzy working for them, Rove and Bush are not homophobic about who they associate with on a daily basis – which I assure you would come as a huge shock to their supporters out there who hate all gay people to the point that they want us all locked up simply for being who we are.
Izzy, Ken Melhman, David Drier, Mark Foley and all the Log Cabinners are projecting their own self-loathing by fraternizing with people whose stated goal is to see them subjugated.
As I said above, that’s an obscenity of the first order.