I agree with John Tabin that Andrew Sullivan is not a serious person, but I also understand Sullivan’s position that his views on “the closet” have evolved over time.
Here’s the deal, though. Sullivan is allowing his personal idiosyncratic agenda to color his analysis. Sullivan wants Kagan to be gay and he wants her to declare that’s she gay and he wants her to be confirmed anyway. That would represent a major breakthrough for gay equality in this country. A closeted Supreme Court Justice wouldn’t provide the same bang for the buck, and, in some ways, it would perpetuate the stigma around homosexuality. Sullivan tries to tell us that we have the right to know whether Kagan goes down on other women, in the same way that we have a right to know if she’s married and has children. I suppose we have a right to know if she is co-habitating with someone, but do we have a right to know if she goes on dates or what she did by way of experimentation during her college years?
Consider that the White House has already told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post that Kagan in not a lesbian. That’s not something you want to have to retract, so they presumably believe that she’s straight. Does Sullivan want to hear those words from Kagan’s mouth? Obviously not. He wants to hear the opposite.
Most commentary I’ve seen on gay blogs works from the assumption that Kagan is gay and then asks whether she should come out of the closet at this moment of highest scrutiny or attempt to avoid answering the question. If this were mainly good faith advice to be honest and forthright to avoid getting caught in a lie or coming off as shady or ashamed, then I’d probably by more sympathetic. But whatever Kagan’s sexual orientation may be, it’s clearly not central to her self-identity. Maybe some gay activists want to transform this from a debate about her qualifications and temperament into a national debate about being gay in modern America, but nothing about Kagan’s laser-focused career suggests to me that she’d agree.
At Hunter College High School in the 1970s, Ms. Kagan was a standout in a school of ultrabright girls. At least one classmate there, Natalie Bowden, remembers she had an ambitious goal: to become a Supreme Court justice.
“That was a goal from the very beginning,” Ms. Bowden said. “She did talk about it then.”
…Although there was nothing judicial about the student government, in her senior yearbook Ms. Kagan, in wire-rimmed aviator glasses and long hair, is pictured on the group’s page wearing a judge’s robe, gavel in hand. Underneath is a quotation from Justice Frankfurter, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“Government,” it reads, “is itself an art, one of the subtlest of arts.”
Does that sound like someone who wants to transform everything she’s done to get to this point into a debate about her sexuality and its meaning for American society? I don’t think so. Frankly, I don’t want to speculate about her sexuality because I think it’s disrespectful. But I would understand it if she spent her life believing that being openly gay would crush her lifelong dream of being a Supreme Court justice. I’d also understand it if she didn’t want a family interfering with her searing ambition.
Whatever the case, she was not picked to be a breakthrough nominee. The White House says she’s not gay. If she wants to say that for herself, that’s fine by me, but she shouldn’t be forced to out herself to satisfy someone else’s agenda.
In 1991, Sullivan wrote the following in the The New Republic, which he now disavows:
In all the recent brouhaha over the “outing” of alleged homosexuals, one fallacy has remained virtually unchallenged. It’s the notion of a simple “closet” and the crude assertion that one is either in it or out of it. I know of no one to whom this applies. Most homosexuals and lesbians whose sexualities are developed beyond adolescence are neither “in” nor “out.” They hover tentatively somewhere in between. And most outings are not essentially about dragging someone out of anything. They are crude assertions about invariably complex people, which have very little to do with the nature of someone’s sexuality, and all to do with who controls the disclosure of it.
It should be noted that there are many people who hover tentatively somewhere between gay and straight, not just “in” or “out,” and that not everyone adopts a team as part of their self-identification. Some people are actually disinterested enough in having sexual relations with other people that they don’t bother to have them. Sullivan wants Kagan to explain her spinsterhood. Does the choice not to get married now require a obligatory gay-denial? Does Sullivan really want to establish the principle that there are only two teams, ‘gay’ and ‘straight,’ and all nominees must publicly choose a side? Does he now believe that no one can serve in government while remaining in the closet?
Sullivan’s views may have evolved, but he was right about this:
They are crude assertions about invariably complex people, which have very little to do with the nature of someone’s sexuality, and all to do with who controls the disclosure of it.
Sullivan should stick to writing about the provenance of the Palin children.