The Pasty Little Putz has been watching TV. (Apparently he does TV and MoDo does movies…) In “The World According to Team Walt” he gurgles that in “Breaking Bad,” there’s an alternative moral code with an internal logic all its own. MoDo headed out to Utah to stare at the NSA storage facilities. In “Creeping Cloud” she says it’s 1984 in 2013: The Utah death star intercepts our whispers. The Moustache of Wisdom has a question in “Hassan Does Manhattan:” What is the significance of the new leadership in Tehran? Mr. Kristof tells us “A Way of Life Is Ending. Thank Goodness.” He says he has some good news for a change: extreme poverty and disease are on their way out. Mr. Bruni has a question in “The Log Cabin Republican.” He says Mike Fleck, a four-term state representative in Pennsylvania, hunts, prays and comes from a family with deep roots in his verdant stretch of the heartland. Will being gay nullify all of that? Here’s the Putz:
Across five seasons of riveting television, the antihero of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Walter Hartwell White, has committed enough crimes to earn several life sentences from any reasonable jury. He has cooked crystal meth in bulk, hooking addicts from his native Albuquerque all the way to Prague. He has personally killed at least seven people and is implicated in the deaths of hundreds more. He has poisoned an innocent child, taken out a contract on his longtime partner, and stood by and watched a young woman choke to death.
But one thing he hasn’t done, as this weekend’s series finale looms, is entirely forfeit the sympathies of his audience. As a cultural phenomenon, this is the most striking aspect of “Breaking Bad” — the persistence, after everything he’s done, of a Team Walt that still wants him to prevail.
In the online realms where hit shows are dissected, critics who pass judgment on Walt’s sins find themselves tangling with a multitude of commenters who don’t think he needs forgiveness. And it isn’t just the anonymous hordes who take his side. “You’d think I’d bear Walt some serious ill will considering he sat there and watched Jane die,” the actress who played his vomit-choked victim wrote for New York magazine last week, “but I’m still rooting for everything to work out for the guy.”
On the surface, this sympathy is not surprising, given the long pop culture tradition of rooting for the bad guy. But you don’t usually hear audiences argue insistently that their favorite villains are actually heroic — that a J. R. Ewing or a Francis Underwood is a misunderstood paragon of virtue. And when viewers do make excuses for fictional criminals, it’s usually because those characters inhabit distinctive, hermetic worlds — the Jersey mafia on “The Sopranos,” West Baltimore on “The Wire” — in which becoming a killer is less a decision than an inheritance, which we can root for them to escape from or rise above.
Walter White, though, begins as a perfectly law-abiding citizen — a high school chemistry teacher and family man, who turns to cooking meth after a terminal cancer diagnosis because it promises to make money for his family. He isn’t the product of a lawless environment who never knew another way. He’s a protagonist who made a conscious decision to embrace what society regards as evil, to step permanently outside our civilization’s moral norms.
This means “Breaking Bad” implicitly challenges audiences to get down to bedrock and actually justify those norms. Why is it so wrong to kill strangers — often dangerous strangers! — so that your own family can survive and prosper? Why is it wrong to exploit people you don’t see or care about for the sake of those inside your circle? Why is Walter White’s empire-building — carried out with boldness, brilliance and guile — not an achievement to be admired?
And the fact that so many viewers do seem to end up admiring him — even to the point of despising Walt’s conflicted wife, Skyler, because she doesn’t appreciate him — is a reminder that the answers to these questions aren’t actually as self-evident as our civilization would like to assume.
The allure for Team Walt is not ultimately the pull of nihilism, or the harmless thrill of rooting for a supervillain. It’s the pull of an alternative moral code, neither liberal nor Judeo-Christian, with an internal logic all its own. As James Bowman wrote in The New Atlantis, embracing Walt doesn’t requiring embracing “individual savagery” and a world without moral rules. It just requires a return to “old rules” — to “the tribal, family-oriented society and the honor culture that actually did precede the Enlightenment’s commitment to universal values.”
Those rules seem cruel by the lights of both cosmopolitanism and Christianity, but they are not irrational or necessarily false. Their Darwinian logic is clear enough, and where the show takes place — in the shadow of cancer, the shadow of death — the kindlier alternatives can seem softheaded, pointless, naïve.
Nor can this tribal morality be refuted in a laboratory. Indeed, by making Walt a chemistry genius, the show offers an implicit rebuke to the persistent modern conceit that a scientific worldview logically implies liberalism, humanism and a widening circle of concern. On “Breaking Bad,” that worldview just makes Walt a better kingpin, and the beautiful equations of chemistry are deployed to addict, poison, decompose.
To be clear, I don’t think the show itself is actually on Walt’s side. I think Team Walt badly misreads the story’s moral arc and vision.
But the pervasiveness of that misreading tells us something significant. It’s comforting to dismiss Walt’s admirers as sickos, idiots, “bad fans.” But they, too, can be moralists — drawn by their sympathy for Walter White into a worldview that still lies percolating, like one of his reactions, just below the surface of every human heart.
It would appear to be a worldview that all the Republicans in Congress hew to… Here’s MoDo, writing from Bluffdale, Utah:
At the Husband and Wife lingerie store here in Mormon country — where babies are welcome amid the sex toys and the motto is “Classy, tasteful and comfortable” — no one had heard of it.
At the Allami smoke shop across the street, adjacent to a hypnosis center that can help you stop smoking, they were disturbed by it. Down the road at Quiznos, the young man making subs went on a rant about his insular community’s compliance with the government’s intrusions into Americans’ private lives.
Indeed, this valley of subdivisions, sagebrush and one of the remaining polygamous sects gets more exercised about the letter “c” — there’s a Kapuccino cafe, a Maverik convenience store and a Pikasso print shop — than they do about the National Security Agency’s secretive new $2 billion, one- million-square-foot data death star.
As Mark Reid, Bluffdale’s city manager, told The Times’s Michael Schmidt, the community’s initial excitement about new jobs faded because many of the data analysts are elsewhere. The good jobs, he says, are for security dogs who have a “plush” kennel.
“They don’t interact with anybody, they don’t let anybody come up there,” he said: “It is like they are not there. It is not like they are I.B.M. and they join us for town days and sponsor a booth.”
At a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington on Thursday, Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado tried to pin down the shadowy and largely unchecked Emperor Alexander, as the N.S.A. head, Gen. Keith Alexander, is known, on whether his agency is indiscriminately Hoovering Americans’ phone records.
“I believe it is in the nation’s best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it, yes,” Alexander said.
When Alexander was asked a year ago if the Bluffdale center would hold the data of Americans, he replied no: “We don’t hold data on U.S. citizens,” adding that reports that they would “grab all the e-mails” were “grossly misreported.”
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon told me ruefully that on Thursday, “Alexander put in a lockbox information that he’s told the public he doesn’t have. This is what we’re dealing with.
“They think it’s O.K. to repeatedly say one thing to the public about domestic surveillance and do something completely different in private,” continued Wyden, who pressed Alexander about whether they’re collecting cellphone location information.
The senator is skeptical that the N.S.A. is open to reform, noting, “They’re just putting the same wine in a new bottle.”
Alexander recently wrote his employees’ families to reassure them that any news reports that the agency had overreached —behaving “as more of a rogue element than a national treasure” —were “sensationalized.”
Yet, news broke this past week that the N.S.A. inspector general admitted that there have been a dozen instances of staffers spying on love interests. (The Wall Street Journal said this practice is known as “LOVEINT,” for love intelligence.)
The Bluffdale sinkhole, which has quietly started sucking in mountains of data in the shadow of mountains, is the lockbox. This squat, ugly complex of four buildings is the creepy symbol of the N.S.A.’s remorseless reach deep into our lives. I drove onto the Utah National Guard’s Camp Williams base to see the concrete data cloud up close.
Never mind puny terabytes. Or even exabytes, a handful of which can hold all knowledge from the dawn of man, according to estimates.
James Bamford, the chronicler of the untrammeled powers of the “Puzzle Palace,” as he calls the N.S.A., wrote in Wired that the Utah tower of Babel may be able to store a yottabyte. That is equal to a septillion bytes or about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
“It’s basically the N.S.A.’s external hard drive,” Bamford told me, noting that our phone call was no doubt being logged by the Bluffdale computers. “It holds more private information than anyplace else on earth.”
Bamford believes that the N.S.A. has transmogrified from an agency that “watched the Soviet Union to make sure it didn’t blow us up with nuclear weapons,” to one “that keeps collecting and collecting and collecting but doesn’t seem to do us any good.”
“They saw 9/11 and all these other terrorist attacks on CNN. They didn’t have a clue. The more electronic hay they stack on their haystack, the more difficult it is to find the needle.”
Bamford believes that Americans need to get out of their crouch on terrorism and get alarmed that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, can deceive Congress without even a reprimand from the president.
Still, Bamford and Wyden see signs of hope. “If you had told me six months ago that somebody would come up and ask me about the FISA court at the barbershop,” Wyden said, “I would have said fat chance.”
Gee, MoDo, I wonder why you made no mention of how we found out about the worst of what’s going on. Here’s a hint: his initials are Edward Snowden. Next up we have The Moustache of Wisdom:
I had the chance this past week to take part in two press meetings with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, and they left me with several distinct impressions:
1) He’s not here by accident. That is, this Iranian charm offensive is not because Rouhani, unlike his predecessor, went to charm school. Powerful domestic pressures have driven him here. 2) We are finally going to see a serious, face-to-face negotiation between top Iranian and American diplomats over Iran’s nuclear program. 3) I have no clue and would not dare predict whether these negotiations will lead to a peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis. 4) The fact that we’re now going to see serious negotiations raises the stakes considerably. It means that if talks fail, President Obama will face a real choice between military action and permanent sanctions that could help turn Iran into a giant failed state. 5) Pray that option 2 succeeds.
Let’s go through these. Think about Iran’s recent election that brought Rouhani to the presidency. Iran’s Guardian Council approved only eight candidates, and two dropped out before the balloting. All were considered “safe” from the regime’s point of view — no authentic liberals — but as the election approached, it became clear that Rouhani was a bit more liberal than the others. So Iranians had a choice: Mr. Black, Mr. Black, Mr. Black, Mr. Black, Mr. Black or Mr. Gray. And guess what happened?
On June 14, Mr. Gray, Hassan Rouhani, won by a landslide, garnering nearly 51 percent of the votes, with the second place finisher, the mayor of Tehran, getting about 16 percent. Clearly, many Iranians are fed up and used the sliver of openness they had to stampede toward the most liberal candidate. Again, Iranians have now had enough democracy to know they want more of it, and they’ve had enough Islamic ideology and sanctions to know they want less of them.
I am not alone in that view. The Iranian rial, which had lost some two-thirds of its value in the past two years of sanctions, shot up after Rouhani’s election, and Iran’s stock exchange rose 7 percent, on hopes that the new president would negotiate a nuclear deal to end the sanctions. In a country with rampant unemployment and nearly 30 percent inflation, is this any surprise?
No, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, did not allow Rouhani to run and win and start negotiations by accident. The power struggle in Iran is no longer just between the Revolutionary Guards, with their vast business network and illegal ports that they use to break the sanctions and enrich themselves, and the more pragmatic clerics. The Iranian silent majority is now empowered and is in this story, and Rouhani’s charm offensive was dictated as much by them as by the supreme leader.
I had a chat with Rouhani’s very sharp chief of staff, Mohammad Nahavandian, and asked about his background. He is an economist, earned his Ph.D. at George Washington University, and recently led the Iran Chamber of Commerce and Iran’s negotiating team to join the World Trade Organization. He’s Rouhani’s closest aide. Interesting.
To put it another way, Rouhani is here because Iran’s regime is both overextended and underintegrated.
Ten years ago, America was overextended in the Middle East — mired in Iraq and Afghanistan and vulnerable to covert attacks by Iran and its allies. Today, Iran’s regime is overextended, expending men and money and energy every day to keep the Syrian regime alive, Hezbollah on its feet in Lebanon and its allies fortified in Iraq and Afghanistan. But while the regime is overextended, Iranians under age 30 — some 60 percent of the population — feel underintegrated with the rest of the world. They want to be able to study, work and travel in — and listen to music, read books and watch films from — the rest of the world. That means lifting sanctions.
The fact that Rouhani could not shake President Obama’s hand (they did speak by phone, in the end) because he feared a photo-op would be used against him by hard-line Revolutionary Guards back home — before he had gains to show for it — tells us how hard it will be to reach the only kind of nuclear deal Obama can sign on to. That is one that affirms Iran’s right to produce fuel for civilian nuclear power, but with a nuclear enrichment infrastructure small enough, and international oversight and safeguards stringent enough, that a quick breakout to a bomb would be impossible.
Geopolitics is all about leverage: who’s got it and who doesn’t. Today, the negotiating table is tilted our way. That is to Obama’s credit. We should offer Iranians a deal that accedes to their desire for civilian nuclear power and thus affirms their scientific prowess — remember that Iran’s 1979 revolution was as much a nationalist rebellion against a regime installed by the West as a religious revolution, so having a nuclear program has broad nationalist appeal there — while insisting on a foolproof inspection regime. We can accept that deal, but can they? I don’t know. But if we put it on the table and make it public, so the Iranian people also get a vote — not just the pragmatists and hard-liners in the regime — you’ll see some real politics break out there, and it won’t merely be about the quality of Iran’s nuclear program but about the quality of life in Iran.
Next up we have Mr. Kristof:
Imagine having to pick just one of your children to save, while leaving the others to face death.
One of my most searing experiences as a reporter occurred in Cambodia, where I met a woman whose daughter had just died of malaria and who was left caring for seven children and grandchildren.
The woman, Nhem Yen, showed me her one anti-malaria bed net and told me how every evening she agonized over which children to squeeze under it — and which ones to leave out and expose to malarial mosquitoes.
That’s the kind of excruciating question that extreme poverty forces on families.
For thousands of generations, a vast majority of humans have lived brief, illiterate lives marked by disease, disability and the loss of children. As recently as 1980, a slight majority of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty, defined as surviving on less than $1.25 in today’s money.
Yet in a time of depressing news worldwide, about dysfunction and crisis from Syria to our own Congress, here’s one area of spectacular progress.
The share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has been reduced from 1 in 2 in 1980 to 1 in 5 today, according to the World Bank. Now the aim is to reduce that to almost zero by 2030.
There will still be poverty, of course, just as there is far too much poverty lingering in America. But the extreme hanging-by-your-fingernails subsistence in a thatch-roof hut, your children uneducated and dying — that will go from typical to essentially nonexistent just in the course of my adult life.
Here’s something even more important than Congressional name-calling or the debt limit: New approaches are saving millions of children’s lives each year. In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5. Now that figure is down close to 6 million. Bill Gates, whose foundation with his wife, Melinda, pioneers the vaccines and medicines saving these lives, tells me that in his lifetime the number will drop below 1 million.
Illiteracy is retreating and technology is spreading. More people worldwide now have cellphones than toilets.
Timeout for a skeptical question that is both callous and common:
When additional kids survive in poor countries, does that really matter? Isn’t the result just a population explosion leading to famine or war, and more deaths?
That’s a frequent objection, but it’s wrong. When child mortality drops and families know that their children will survive, they are more likely to have fewer babies — and to invest more in them. There’s a well-known path from declining child deaths to declining births, which is why Bangladesh is now down to an average of 2.2 births per woman.
Ancient diseases are on the way out. Guinea worm and polio are likely to be eradicated in the coming years. Malaria has been brought under control in many countries, and a vaccine may reduce its toll even further.
AIDS is also receding. Last year in southern Africa, I interviewed coffin-makers who told me grumpily that their businesses are in recession because AIDS is no longer killing large numbers of people.
The drop in mortality understates the gains, because diseases don’t just kill people but also leave them disabled or unproductive, wrecking the economy. Poor people used to go blind routinely from disease or were unable to work for want of reading glasses. Now they are much less likely to go blind, and far more likely to get glasses.
These achievements aren’t just the result of work by Western donors or aid groups. Some of the biggest gains resulted from economic growth in China and India. When the poor are able to get jobs, they forge their own path out of poverty.
Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the United States aid agency, says he is optimistic that extreme poverty will be eliminated by 2030 but notes that increasingly the focus will have to be on lagging countries like Congo. Aid groups are everywhere in countries like Rwanda or Malawi that are easy to work in, but scarce in eastern Congo or the Nuba Mountains of Sudan where the needs are desperate but working conditions can be dangerous and primitive.
Despite the gains, a Pew poll early this year found that the budget area that Americans most wanted to cut was “aid to the world’s needy.” Perhaps one reason is that aid groups and journalists alike are so focused on problems that we leave the public mistakenly believing that the war on poverty and disease is being lost.
So let’s acknowledge that there’s plenty of work remaining — and that cycles of poverty in America must be a top priority at home — yet also celebrate a triumph for humanity. The world of extreme poverty and disease that characterized life for most people throughout history may now finally be on its way out.
And last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:
Mike Fleck, wholesome country boy, cruised to a second term in the State Legislature in 2008, running unopposed in both the Republican primary and the general election. He got 100 percent of the vote in a largely rural, religious, conservative district.
It was the same two years later: 100 percent. And the same again in 2012.
But for 2014, primary opponents are circling. Some supporters are fleeing. He’s in trouble.
And while nothing has changed — not his deep roots in the farmland here, not his degree from an evangelical Christian university founded by Jerry Falwell, not his fondness for hunting or his pride in the bear pelt from one of his kills — everything has. At the end of last year, he announced that his marriage of 10 years was over. And that he’s gay.
Plenty of people figured that he’d exit state politics after that. But on Monday he’ll announce his campaign for a fifth term. This time, it will almost certainly be a campaign, with rivals and an uncertain outcome, hinging on whether he can persuade his constituents that he’s the same politician they embraced before, the same man, apart from a reality owned up to, a truth embraced.
Their acceptance or rejection of that will be an unusually clear-cut referendum on attitudes about homosexuality in rural America, or at least in this verdant stretch of the heartland about 75 miles west of the state capital of Harrisburg. Fleck, 40, hasn’t changed his position on issues like gun control, of which he’s skeptical. (He owns a pistol, two rifles, one muzzleloader and 10 other firearms.) He didn’t come out of the closet in a swirl of scandal. There was no news about an intern, no talk of an affair. He just came out, because his marriage had unraveled, because the toll of staying in was too steep and because he saw an opportunity to challenge the bigotry in his community by presenting its residents with something that he certainly never saw when he was growing up here, an openly gay man who doesn’t conform to the sorts of stereotypes that are especially prevalent far away from metropolitan areas.
But his re-election bid isn’t just about what people in places like central Pennsylvania are ready for. It also poses the question of how they are supposed to change in the absence of examples like Fleck’s. If most gays and lesbians in rural areas stay silent or bolt for the city, there’s no one and nothing to push back at ingrained prejudices. “Will & Grace” and Ellen DeGeneres can do only so much.
“I love this area,” he told me. “I think it’s going to catch up. But it’s never going to catch up unless there are people like me out there. And that’s true not just of here but of the Bible Belt and a whole lot of America.”
“These are good people,” he added. “They’ve just never had to think about this.”
During several meetings with him over the past two months, I was struck by his determination to believe that and his refusal to accept that one wrinkle of his identity could suddenly change the esteem in which his community holds him, override his family’s long history in these mountains and make anyone question his place and his purpose here.
“I live in the house that was my grandfather’s,” he said, “and that was his grandfather’s.” It has grown over time, but the original part, more than 170 years old, is constructed of logs. It sits between the towns of Orbisonia and Three Springs on Fleck Road, named for his ancestors, and most of the few houses within a three-mile radius are owned by relatives. A stone’s throw away is the tiny hilltop cemetery where aunts and uncles and his father and a sister who died young are all buried, and he took me there one morning without any warning or explanation. I think he just wanted me to see and understand the hold that this patch of earth has on him, and the claim that he has to it.
“He really is truly a son of that community,” said Bob Bomersbach, a friend of Fleck’s who grew up there and now lives in New York. He’s also gay but has family in Three Springs and returns all the time. He told me that while many gay men and women from rural areas “feel as if one piece of themselves means they have to abrogate their ties to their history, their ties to their land, people like Mike and me say, ‘These things belong to us as well. This is part of our heritage.’ ”
Fleck’s parents were particularly well known in the community for their religious devotion. They left the Baptist congregation in which they’d been worshiping to form their own breakaway church, which held its services three times a week in the basement of the house where Mike and his three siblings grew up.
“There was not a night when we didn’t pray as a family or read the Bible as a family,” said Sandy Brumbaugh, Mike’s surviving sister, who lives in Three Springs and is four years older than he is. “There was no drinking, no dancing, and we believed that gays were going to hell, as well as anyone who associated with them. It was even frowned on to be around anyone drinking a glass of wine. That’s what was instilled in us.”
Their father made his living conducting the artificial insemination of dairy cows. He also farmed the acres around their house. He died at 54 when he was plowing a cornfield and the tractor overturned, crushing him.
Fleck says he was so intent on being virtuous and saving himself for marriage that he doesn’t remember having any strong sexual stirrings, but he does recall that when he was 12 and won a poster at a county fair, he asked not for the one of Farrah Fawcett but the one of Burt Reynolds. “The woman wouldn’t give it to me,” he said. “I said, ‘It’s for my mom.’ She gave me Farrah Fawcett anyway.”
His high school class had just 92 students, he said, fewer than a quarter of whom went on to college. He attended Liberty University in Virginia, studying history and youth ministry. After graduation he got a job as an executive with the Boy Scouts in central Pennsylvania. He later married a woman whom he called his best friend, and whom he says he was in love with, in a fashion. The marriage was still holding together fairly well when, in 2006, he ran for and was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives at the age of 33.
But he couldn’t summon the passion for her that he suspected he should be able to, became more and more aware of his sexual attraction to men and found himself powerless to banish it, even though he briefly tried so-called reparative therapy.
He grew increasingly depressed, even suicidal.
“I just couldn’t accept losing her, nor could I accept being gay,” he wrote to me in an e-mail, adding that he also feared “public ridicule” if he came out and the certain loss of his job.
In the summer of 2010, he said, he separated from his wife for a few months. (The couple have no children.) In the summer of 2011, he moved out for good, though both he and she kept quiet about it. And in December 2012, less than a month after his re-election to his fourth and current term, he came out in a lengthy interview with the local newspaper in Huntingdon County, where both his home and district office are.
That announcement kept him ahead of rumors. It also reflected the glimpse he’d been given of possibilities outside central Pennsylvania. He’d become romantically involved with a Manhattan physician, Warren Licht, whom he’d met in Philadelphia, and he was spending many weekends with Licht in New York City, where he mingled for the first time with many openly gay men.
Still, he braced for the worst, even installing a home security system and surveillance cameras just before the story broke.
It drew some national notice, because it made him the only openly gay Republican state legislator nationwide. (Another had just been elected in Ohio and took office the following month.)
Locally, it was a huge deal, eliciting some of the reaction he’d dreaded. In a letter to the editor of the Huntingdon County newspaper, a Baptist pastor wrote, “I know some of his family. You will not meet a nicer guy.”
But, the pastor added, “If you are thinking that homosexuality is not wrong and should be allowed and promoted, then it is my challenge to you to hear what God, the Creator and Judge of this world and everyone in it, says.”
Several local Republicans publicly indicated that they’d challenge Fleck in the primary if he ran for re-election. I bumped into one of them, Rich Irvin, the Huntingdon County treasurer, at a town-hall meeting that I recently accompanied Fleck and Licht to, and I asked him if Fleck’s coming out had created the opening for him and others.
“I know I’ve had constituents urge me to run,” he said, then added: “I have no personal issue with the fact that he’s gay.”
Republicans outnumber Democrats two-to-one in the district, which includes chunks of the state’s Amish and Mennonite populations, and they tend not to be liberal or moderate on social issues. Fleck said that a poll he did last spring showed that fully 80 percent of them are opposed to same-sex marriage, which he supports.
But he doesn’t press that issue, which isn’t likely to come up for a vote in the Republican-controlled statehouse anytime soon. He emphasizes education and jobs and stresses that his chief obligation is to champion what his constituents care about.
“It’s a fascinating race to watch,” said Chuck Wolfe, the president and chief executive of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which promotes L.G.B.T. candidates. “Mike hasn’t done anything to earn the ire of conservative groups other than them now knowing that he’s gay.” What’s more, Republican primary voters who turn against him would be throwing away the seniority he’s accrued over eight years in Harrisburg.
Fleck is in the midst of several balancing acts. Because he suspects that some national antigay organizations will funnel money into the district to oust him, he’s raising some of his own campaign funds outside Pennsylvania, including from gay donors, though opponents could use that against him. Such fund-raising is obviously one reason he cooperated with this column.
And while he doesn’t see his sexual orientation as central to his candidacy, he doesn’t want to forfeit the chance to educate his constituents and be a balm for local gays and lesbians as tortured as he once was. The way he threaded the needle at the town hall, which was focused on higher education, was to invite the openly lesbian president of a rural Pennsylvania university and publicly thank not only her but also Peggy Apple, “her partner of 26 years,” for coming.
After the town hall, the two women, Fleck, Licht and I went to dinner nearby.
“This is probably the largest L.G.B.T. gathering in the county,” Fleck joked.
The university president, Karen Whitney, said that the warm reception she and her partner had received in their community had convinced her that a big part of progress in rural America depended on gays and lesbians showing up, sticking around, weaving themselves in. “People meet you and they don’t immediately change their stereotypes, but they do have to adjust,” she said.
That’s what Fleck is hoping for and counting on, an adjustment. If it proves to be too much to ask and he’s defeated in the primary next May, he said he would nonetheless feel that he had accomplished something, noting that many closeted gay men in rural Pennsylvania had sought him out for counsel.
He recalled one in particular. “I had a Mennonite drive two hours to my house to ask if I thought he could still go to heaven,” Fleck told me. Before last December, that man wouldn’t have known where to turn. He wouldn’t have found an ear and solace in an overgrown log cabin on Fleck Road.
