Tyler's Turn Blog

I don't know why people are saying Alberto Gonzales perjured himself yesterday at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. It was obvious to me that he was carefully choosing his words so as not to technically lie.

Here's the official transcript of the interaction between Senator Schumer and Attorney General Gonzales:

SCHUMER: And if it was about the TSP, you're dissembling to this committee. Now was it about the TSP or not, the discussion on the eighth?

GONZALES: The disagreement on the 10th was about other intelligence activities.

SCHUMER: Not about the TSP, yes or no?

GONZALES: The disagreement and the reason we had to go to the hospital had to do with other intelligence activities.

SCHUMER: Not the TSP?

Come on. If you say it's about "other," that implies not. Now say it or not.

(LAUGHTER)

GONZALES: It was not. It was about other intelligence activities.

SCHUMER: Was it about the TSP? Yes or no, please?

That's vital to whether you're telling the truth to this committee.

GONZALES: It was about other intelligence activities.

See, the TSP has changed since then, and so it was technically an other intelligence activity they were discussing at that meeting in the hospital -- an activity we might call Old TSP.

Not TSP, but Old TSP. See? Not perjury. See?

It's just like Bill Clinton saying, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky." Because in that circumstance he was defining "sexual relations" very narrowly. And that was perfectly fine.

Oh, wait! We impeached him for that, didn't we?

So . . . it may not be perjury, but it's definitely something worth impeaching the SOB over. Or at least it was when the Republicans were in charge. Everything is so different when the shoe is on the other foot.

Most people will remember Tammy Faye as the woman with the running mascara from the PTL Club. In the 1980s, I remember t-shirts with the phrase "I ran into Tammy Faye at the mall" and what looked liked makeup smudges on them. I thought those shirts were hilarious!

However, for gay and lesbian people who grew up conservative Christian during the 1980s, there's another reason to remember Tammy Faye. She was one of the first people to have a person with AIDS on her talk show (long before Princess Di famously hugged a patient at the Middlesex hospital).

At a time when people were still afraid you could catch AIDS from breathing the same air as an infected person, Tammy Faye insisted on interviewing an AIDS patient in person, and told her staff and crew that God would protect her if there was a danger. While other televangelists were celebrating "God's punishment" on the gay community, Tammy Faye challenged her television audience to follow Christ's example and reach out to the sick and needy. I don't think there's any way to say how much that gracious act meant to scared, young, gay Christians like me.

Later, Tammy Faye was one of the first conservative Christian celebrities to openly embrace gay and lesbian people as we were -- without calling for us to change. By then, she had fallen from grace herself, and was living post-scandal in Southern California. But, I believe her embrace of gay people was genuine.

Even during the height of her celebrity, when she was running her mascara daily on national television, Tammy Faye was one of the few televangelists to embrace a gospel of love, instead of a gospel of hate. As Larry King said about her toward the end of her long battle with cancer, "If she's 65 pounds, it's all heart."

I like to think she's in heaven now with her old pal/nemesis Jerry Falwell, saying, "See, Jerry, I was right. God does love everyone -- even you and me."