The teabaggers really don't like Huckleberry. And it's not because of any rumors about his sexual orientation mind you --- they'll tell you they don't care a whit about anyone's private life. They hate him for selling out the country ---- because he's being blackmailed for being gay.
Regardless of the truth about Huck's sexual orientation, it should be noted that this is a favorite rightwing trope --- the closeted gay person being blackmailed by commies (inside and outside the government):
In the 1950s, more bombshells were to detonate in the overall offensive against the "Lavender Menace," which had become a foil for the right-wing in the domestic Cold War.
In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two gay double-agents working in British intelligence, fled to the Soviet Union. This was grist for the mill, linking homosexuality with communist "treason."
In 1952, worldwide publicity accompanied the entrapment and arrest of British mathematician and computer innovator Alan Turing. He was one of 1,686 men rounded up and charged with "gross indecency with males." Turing had risen to fame during World War II after he deciphered a Nazi secret code.
Turing was sentenced to a year of hormonal treatments, which reportedly caused impotence and breast development, and became the target of British government scrutiny as a potential "subversive." He killed himself two years later, at the age of 41.
In the U.S., transphobia also took center stage in 1952. When Christine Jorgensen's plane touched down carrying her home from Denmark, where she'd sought hormonal and surgical help with sex reassignment, 300 reporters surged forward, shouting questions as flash bulbs popped.
She became the brunt of a dehumanizing and degrading campaign from the bully pulpits of radio, newspaper and television.
And that same year, even cold warrior Sen. Joseph McCarthy was publicly baited as a homosexual...
After the 1952 election, in which the Republicans won back Senate control, McCarthy took over as chair of the Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations. He hired 25-year-old attorney Roy Cohn as his chief counsel. Cohn in turn recruited David Schine, later rumored to be his lover, to become chief consultant.
Cohn had close contacts within the FBI. That was important for McCarthy, who reportedly worked hand-in-glove with J. Edgar Hoover's bureau between 1950 and 1953.
One of Hoover's agents, William Sullivan, later conceded, "We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using."
This information sharing was covert and quite illegal. Although bound by law to share information only with the executive branch, the bureau had also reportedly leaked background checks to Congress.
Hoover was said to have recommended Roy Cohn for the post with McCarthy because he was impressed by the young attorney's railroading of Communist Party members Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair on charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hoover himself has been rumored to have had a long-term affair with an assistant, Clyde Tolson.
"As McCarthy's henchman and chief counsel he [Cohn--LF] was responsible for grilling suspected communists on their own sexual tendencies and on whether other people had 'homosexual tendencies.' Cohn and McCarthy subpoenaed gay men in the arts and threatened to out them if they did not produce a list of 'suspected Communists.' (wikipedia.com)
McCarthy had made a name for himself as point man for a far right-wing current that attacked the Truman administration for the "loss" of China from imperialist exploitation after the monumental Communist-led revolution there.
But when McCarthy leveled his guns at the Eisenhower administration for not being "tough enough" on communism, he got his comeuppance. That was when he found himself in the cross-hairs of the anti-homosexual witch hunt.
In 1952, journalist Hank Greenspun wrote a column about the ambitious senator which could not have found its way into print without powerful support. It said that "Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years. ... He seldom dates girls and if he does he laughingly describes it as window dressing. It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities." (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 25, 1952)
There are lessons in that and they're all bad.
This is something in the right wing DNA ---- the guy who went after Graham in that video wasn't even born when that was coming down. They just instinctively go there.
In this day and age it's hard to feel a lot of sympathy for people like Graham if they are gay and voting against the interests of gay people. Even just being a Republican and gay makes them difficult to defend. But the fact is that if Graham is pretending to be Rahm's bff, it's not because he's being blackmailed for being gay. It's because he's doing what he's assigned to do: make the legislation as bad as he can make it.
They really should have a little more respect for Huck. He's one of their most effective saboteurs.