Jon Stewart of The Daily Show broached the topic of the conservative closet almost three years ago, with all deserving satire, following the outing of Spokane Washington Mayor Jim West.  Mayor West, a Republican, had an anti-gay record that would make Ed Schrock proud.  The Daily Show highlights that West worked to bar gay people from working in schools, opposed anti-gay discrimination measures, and vetoed an ordinance giving partnership rights to gay employees.  With a record like that, West must be straight!  As it turns out:

West was caught by a local newspaper that hired someone to pose as a seventeen-year-old boy on Gay.com.  The mayor called it a brutal outing, while everyone else called it perfect irony.

By the way, out of curiosity, just a minor point, off the subject... uh, how many times do the anti-gay force guys have to get caught in gay trysts before everybody just realizes they're all gay?  If you wanna meet gay dudes, start cruising the anti-gay buffet because it's out there, baby!

Stewart rightfully suggests that West, with his socially conservative anti-gay record, may have been "overcompensating."  And situations like this aren't limited to Republicans Ed Schrock and Jim West.  There is a reason even casual observers of politics and current events may have heard of Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, Matt Sanchez, and Larry Craig.  As Bill Maher once commented, "It's guys like Larry Craig, the Senator, who forces guys like Larry Craig, the man, into the airport toilet."  And Larry Craig isn't the only Republican member of Congress dogged by rumors regarding their sexual orientation.  Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Lindsey Graham and Congressman David Dreier have all been subject to speculation regarding their orientation.  Heck, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign manager Ken Mehlman has even been the talk of the town.

Salon also tackled the topic of the crowded conservative closet following the revelations about Larry Craig's summer vacation.  Salon pointed out that the conservative closet is even gaining young new recruits:

The Craig scandal overshadowed still another embarrassing saga from the closets of the red states. During the first week of August, Glenn Murphy, a Republican county chairman from Indiana, mysteriously stepped down as president of the Young Republican National Federation. In a letter to the nation's Young Republican leaders, he claimed that he was obliged to resign because of a pending major business opportunity. That explanation seemed unlikely in light of news concerning an investigation of Murphy for sexually molesting another man after a party. That young gentleman, a guest in a house where Murphy was staying, awoke the next morning to find the chairman's mouth on his genitalia.

Murphy's star may no longer rise, but his tale is a portent for the future. So long as Republicans promote homophobia, the party's closets will be crowded.

There are so many such incidents that a perfectly reasonable person can subscribe to the Jon Stewart theory that pretty much every vocally anti-gay crusader is gay, or at least overcompensating for conflicted feelings on some level - or, in the case of the Republican candidates for President, pandering to those that buy into institutionalized homophobia.  I truly can't fathom what it's like for Log Cabin Republicans, openly gay Republican former Congressman Jim Kolbe, or gay Republicans across the country, working on behalf of and voting for candidates from a Party whose social policy goal is the deprivation of their civil rights.

On a side note, to all those politicians (and it's not limited to just one political Party) who claim that allowing same-sex marriage devalues or undermines "traditional" marriage - like Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain - quite seriously, how much less do you love your wife right now than you did on May 16, 2004, the very last day before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began performing legal, state-sanctioned same-sex marriages?  Surely, if same-sex marriage devalues or undermines marriage for everyone else, you three must love your wives less now than you did before same-sex marriage because, if you didn't, what would all the fuss be about?  (At least Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfuss set the record straight!)

Anyway, with pretty much any vocally anti-gay or blatantly homophobic individual harboring conflicted feelings about their own sexuality, we return to John Gibson and his tasteless, homophobic stand-up routine following the death of Heath Ledger.  What with Gibson's poofy hair and come-hither grin, we have to assume that he is probably taking up space in the conservative closet.  And, anytime a high-fallutin' social conservative soapboxes on how deleterious the "gay lifestyle" is to the rest of us Leave It to Beaver-style heterosexuals, perhaps we should respond not with disdain but with condolence, knowing why he or she can't just come out of the closet instead of waiting for an Ed-Schrock-Jim-West style outing.

None of us can forget where we were when we first heard those immortal words uttered, "I am not gay.  I never have been gay."  (Seriously, how has that not been made into a cell phone ringtone yet?)  Nevertheless, when you look at precedent, odds suggest that many of these denials are really just pleas to not get kicked out of the conservative club even if they're being yanked out of the conservative closet.  And every gay joke is really just overcompensation for... something.