ABSTRACT
During the 2004 election, Republicans focused the public's attention on moral issues to distract citizens from their party's incompetence and immorality. The Republican Party's campaign of social hatred and misrepresentation does not constitute politics as usual. Despite its contested status among historians, the ongoing American crisis of masculinity provides a clue. For Susan Bordo, one of the most revealing elements of the 1990s' gays-in-the-military debate had to do with the fact that those who have argued against the disclosure of sexual orientation readily admit that there have always been gay men in the military. Comradeship is involved in the "pleasure" of war, although, J. Glenn Gray acknowledges, "men can live in the same room and share the same suffering without any sense of belonging together. Even if most victims are women and children, war is a homosocial affair among men. Twenty to fifty percent of all murders occur within the family. The most common predictor of stalking is domestic violence.
