Barney Frank On Bailouts, Welfare

Tells 60 Minutes An Auto Industry Bailout Would Help People, Not Companies

(CBS)  But there are those who argue that reducing foreclosures would reward and encourage delinquencies. "You have the guy who’s working three jobs so he can pay off his mortgage; you have a guy who’s delinquent. He gets help, this other guy doesn’t get help. So isn’t there an unfairness…," Stahl points out.

"Yes, there is," Frank acknowledges.

"That you're setting up? And why shouldn't the guy over here who's been paying off his mortgage," Stahl asks. "Why doesn't he deliberately stop paying it."

"Let me give you another unfairness. I wanna see what you think about this. What about someone who's been working hard, 40 hours a week, maybe with some overtime, and goin' to work every day. And then his neighbor loses his job. The neighbor starts getting unemployment insurance. The neighbor who lost his job is getting money for nothing, from the government. There's some unfairness there," Frank argues.

Because of his support over the years of affordable housing for the poor, conservatives actually blame him for the whole sub-prime mortgage mess, saying he enabled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to back riskier and riskier loans. Accusations he fends off, most famously in a screaming match with Bill O’Reilly.

Frank has been a target of criticism for years, and not just because he's a liberal.

"I’m gay, I’m left handed, I’m Jewish," he says. "There’s a lot of things that I’m supposed to do that I don’t do."

One thing he does do is get re-elected over and over as an openly gay man, though his district is in Massachusetts.

60 Minutes caught up in Fall River, Mass., where 60 Minutes met the congressman with his boyfriend, Jim Ready.

"It must have been really hard for a gay kid in high school in the '50s," Stahl remarks.

"Well, it was hard internally. It wasn't hard externally because I just never told anybody I was gay. I mean, not anybody. Not a single human being," Frank says.

He grew up in blue-collar Bayonne, N.J., a Jewish kid in a predominantly Catholic community, who was gay.

He says he realized he was gay when he was 13 years old. "And it was very depressing, very sad. And I was frightened about it. I just figured, okay, I will repress it. "