Andrew Sullivan, and a slew of gay activists and bloggers are all over the, “Is SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan gay?” issue, and their point of view may surprise you.
You’d think those nasty rapscallions on the right would be going hard after the lesbian angle, but, with the possible exception of Maggie Gallagher and her NOM henchmen, claiming, (quite frankly, stupidly,) “A Vote for Kagan Is a Vote for Gay Marriage,” theirs has been a whisper campaign. (And you can just flat-out call B.S. on Maggie for saying HRC agrees with her. They do not. But Maggie never links to items that would prove she’s twisting truth. It’s just easier that way.)
From the gays in the blogosphere, however, well, there’s an entirely different story.
Andrew Sullivan (whom we can hardly call being on the right anymore, thank goodness,) demands to know. In, “So Is She Gay?” he posits,
It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay … and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively.
Hmmm… On the one hand, this makes me ponder. Let’s continue.
In a word, this is preposterous – a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should mean nothing either way.
Darn right, it should mean nothing either way. And yet, how terribly presumptuous to assume that it does not. Kagan is 50. Sullivan is 46. Both come from a time when it was more “appropriate” to hide one’s homosexuality than to be open. Sullivan took one road, perhaps (I said, perhaps) Kagan took another.
Since the issue of this tiny minority – and the right of the huge majority to determine its rights and equality – is a live issue for the court in the next generation, and since it would be bizarre to argue that a Justice’s sexual orientation will not in some way affect his or her judgment of the issue, it is only logical that this question should be clarified.
Now hold on here.
This is the crux of the issue and the exact problem I have with all those on the right who were screaming when Judge Vaughn Walker’s homosexuality was “exposed.” (It was considered well-known before the Prop 8 trial.) The Maggie Gallagher brigade was clamoring that of course Walker would decide the federal Prop 8 trial, automatically, for “the gays.” As if Clarence Thomas would decide every case for “the blacks.” And as if one element of one’s identity is always the deciding factor in all they do. Why, look at right-wing zealot Michelle Malkin, whose entire existence seems poised to rebel against everything she is.
Ridiculous.
Sullivan continues:
It’s especially true with respect to Obama. He has, after all, told us that one of his criteria for a Supreme Court Justice is knowing what it feels like to be on the wrong side of legal discrimination. Well: does he view Kagan’s possible life-experience as a gay woman relevant to this? Did Obama even ask about it? Are we ever going to know one way or the other? Does she have a spouse? Is this spouse going to be forced into the background in a way no heterosexual spouse ever would be?
GayPatriot stoops so low as to ask, if Kagan is gay, “is she actually filling the homosexual Supreme Court seat left vacant since last year?”
Oh come on, you never heard of the David Souter gay talk? Where have you been? In the same crowd of women that pine for Anderson Cooper…. or the Village People? Sheesh.
Nice…
But he does ask, “why does Obama think that being a lesbian is such a bad thing?” A valid question, given the White House’s deplorable jump to uphold Kagan’s “straightness.”
At least Elijah Sweete puts it a little nicer. In, “Sex And The Supremes – Kagan Is Sixth “Maybe Gay†Nominee,” he includes “Frank Murphy, Benjamin Cardozo, James McReynolds and David Souter” as on-the-court and “suspected of being gay, or bisexual.”
Gay activist, writer, and Sirius radio host Michelangelo Signorile weighed in last night. We had, via Twitter, a robust conversation, prompted by his tweet:
The story has now become highly relevant: Kagan now needs to say if she is a lesbian or not. And the press must ask her point blank.
And later,
Was it “our business” if Souter was gay? If Scalia or Thomas is? Why is it “our business” that they’re straight? Or Catholic?
Hmmm… again. Good points.
And, lastly,
Why do let right dictate terms: They say it’s bad to be gay, so we so okay, keep it a secret, don’t dare ask. Very weak.
Signorile and Sullivan are taking this issue on to highlight the “tyranny of the closet,” and rightly so. But at what point do we cross the line in using an individual’s privacy to further our own causes? I’m certainly not saying they are, I’m just asking.
In, “Elena Kagan Is Not Gay,” The Nation’s Richard Kim, looking back on a Sullivan-Signorile event a decade ago, calls this “the high-tech lynching of an uppity ambiguous Harvard dean.” Kim then calls Sullivan’s reasoning “naive,” and wonders if Sullivan is, “exorcising some old demons.”
Earlier in the day, Sullivan wrote:
The NYT’s bizarre profile of Kagan, which plumbs every minute aspect of her most intimate and private life while saying nothing whatever about her emotional relationships, home, dating, or indeed anything that might even touch upon her sexual orientation, gay or straight, is so contrived in its avoidance of the obvious it is almost comic. To put it bluntly: the NYT can produce 4,500 words on a person and barely address the three most common Google searches on her name. There is some kind of disconnect here, no?
So I stick to my guns. If Obama had not publicly declared someone’s life experiences to be essential to his pick of a Supreme Court Justice, it would be one thing.
If Kagan is gay, or not, it’s between her and whomever she chooses, unless she is but denies it to the public. In other words, unless she flat out lies. Personally, I would rather have an “out” judge than a closeted one. A closeted judge in this day and age is not a tribute to our community. It’s one thing to point to someone from the 1940s and say, “And did you know they were gay?” It’s another to point to someone prominent in today’s society who is, but isn’t out.