Like the California governor’s race, the race to replace Gov. Jeb Bush in Florida has not been making a lot of news outside the state. But in the wake of the outing of Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley, there appears to be heightened interest in the sexual preference of the Republican candidate, Charles Crist:

Last week, [speculation about whether Crist is gay] broke through to the national media when, in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC talkshow, Pat Campbell, an Orlando-based conservative radio host, accused Democratic operatives of floating the gay rumor to help Crist’s opponent, Jim Davis, who is behind in the polls. “What are they playing right now? Charlie Crist is gay,” Campell complained. “This is the party that supposedly deplores the personal destruction, yet they’re experts in it.”

Max Linn, an independent candidate for the governorship, pushed the story along further Wednesday in another radio interview, claiming he knew Crist to be gay for a fact, and challenging him to admit it. “Charlie, come out, come out from wherever you are,” Linn jabbed.

While it’s undoubtedly a poor time for a Republican to be forcibly outed, it’s not clear how much a public admission of homosexuality, on its own, would hurt Crist’s prospects in a state with a large gay population. For one thing, Crist is relatively insulated from charges of hypocrisy: While he supports the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, he also has cautiously endorsed gay civil unions.

That may be why Crist’s antagonists are resorting to a potentially more damaging tactic: trying to make explicit the implicit link between him and Foley. According to Bob Norman, a columnist for the New Times of Broward-Palm Beach, and the first reporter to out Foley back in 2003, “As soon as the scandal broke there were rumors that Crist and Foley had been roommates in Tallahassee in the early ’90s when they were both state senators.”

Crist’s office didn’t return calls for comment, but a search of public records turned up no evidence of a shared address during that period or any other.

It beats me why gay people want to belong to a political party that does not want them, that actively attempts to codify discrimination against them into the law and that cynically uses issues related to their civil rights to gin up votes among homophobes and bigots. It can only come from a deep self-loathing.