Waldo Lydecker's Journal.: Somewhere, Vidkun Quisling is laughing his ass off

Former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman sat in a lot of meetings about how to demonize gay Americans to drive up the Republican vote count. He cashed big paychecks for a long time while he was doing the party's bidding to make gay Americans scary, like terrorists.

Now, he says, he's gay. And he wonders why gay voters didn't side with the GOP in opposition to anti-gay terrorists in places the voters didn't live. Sorry, Mr. Mehlman, we were busy dealing with the other side of your agenda- the antigay terrorists here at home. Now that you're settled in a cushy private equity fund job on Wall Street and a $4m condo in uber-gay Chelsea, it costs you nothing to whinge about how relieved you feel and how you are looking forward to going out and buying friends:

Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush "was no homophobe." He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called "the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now."

Mehlman's leadership positions in the GOP came at a time when the party was stepping up its anti-gay activities -- such as the distribution in West Virginia in 2006 of literature linking homosexuality to atheism, or the less-than-subtle, coded language in the party's platform ("Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country..."). Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus. He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.

Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.

"It's a legitimate question and one I understand," Mehlman said. "I can't change the fact that I wasn't in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally." He asks of those who doubt his sincerity: "If they can't offer support, at least offer understanding."