Something I Did Not Know

I have been warning people on the left not to fall too much in love with Andrew Sullivan just because he was disenchanted with the Republican Party. See he is still a flaming right winger who doesn't care much for folks on the low end of the totem pole, he just found a few issues to rail against the GOP about like torture and indefinite detention and he also wishes they packaged their bullshit up better but that's about it. Well I learned something else about Sully today that I hadn't been aware of till now:

Nine years ago Andrew Sullivan was caught up in a sex scandal when an anonymous personal ad he took out on a site called barebackcity.com was exposed by gay journalist and outing proponent Michelangelo Signorile. Sullivan claimed that he was a victim of "sexual McCarthyism" and sampling Clarence Thomas, called the whole incident the "high-tech lynching of an uppity homo." Back then, I defended Sullivan's right to sexual privacy. But I also noted that given the fact that Sullivan had made a career of lambasting the sexual promiscuity of fellow gay men (including analogizing unprotected oral sex with murder), as well as the peccadillos of our first "queer" president, Bill Clinton—Sullivan had opened himself up as a target. What he wanted was not sexual privacy (an ethic extending to all), but sexual secrecy for himself with the attendant hypocritical right to wag his finger at those whose secrets became hot public messes.

So here is Sully being the world's biggest hypocrite trolling a website for random sexual encounters while blasting other gay men for doing the exact same thing. And not only did he do this, he then when outed did not apologize but instead blasted the people who outed him.

See he was pretty sure he had a right to privacy in that matter. And I don't necessarily disagree.

But its amazing that a guy who could take that stance about his own private life would now be arguing that Elena Kagan should be made to answer on the record whether she is gay or not. Mind you I don't know if she is or she isn't and I truly couldn't care either way, but surely she should have the same expectation of privacy that Sully himself felt he should have been afforded don't you think?

And one has to wonder what kind of outrage Sully would evince should employers start requiring every worker to disclose their sexual orientation on applications and or in hiring interviews. Some how I doubt mightily that he would think that kosher, yet in the case of Kagan its paramount that we know.

Why?

The funny thing is if pressed on the issue he couldn't possibly come up with a good answer. Supreme Court justices are given the ultimate tenure, they have that job for life. So there is no way anybody could pressure her by threatening to out her should she be confirmed because at that point she would lose nothing if it came out. If somebody came out today and said Sam Alito was "teh ghey" it would have no bearing on his standing as a justice and even if some of us would point out the hypocrisy thats about the most we would get out of it. There is nothing about being a Supreme Court justice that would make her being gay a germane fact one way or another.

Unless...

Unless Sully is trying to say that gay people think different from the rest of us and all things being equal would interpret the law in a different way.

Is that REALLY the impression he wants to make? Is that REALLY a path he wants to go down? I sincerely doubt it. Rather I think as is usual with him he just found some silly ass cause to jump on and so he went at it feet first. One can only hope that this does not become a crusade for him like Sarah Palin's daughter did.

Then again once an obsessed asshole, always an obssessed asshole so I wouldn't expect anything less.

Even people on the left opposed to Kagan's nomination should be able to see how wrong it is for this to be a focus of her confirmation process. If not I am going to be very dissappointed in a lot of people because if Republicans/right wingers were to do it we for damn sure wouldn't think it was ok.