Wordsmoker

LT: No. I’m objecting to Kagan not disclosing her sexuality, which is of legitimate public concern. Read my post.

I don’t really care about the ignominious tradition of recent Supreme Court nominees evading substantive questions in their Senate hearings. That’s how we got John Roberts and the wretched Samuel Alito. This needs to stop, and if it stops with Kagan, then so be it.

Yours is a pragmatic, descriptive view of Supreme Court nominee hearings. I’m throwing out a normative alternative. Let’s find out if she’s gay. And if she is, then why hasn’t she come out? Anyone who cares about civil rights ought to care about this.

BJ: Can you imagine an Klan member not disclosing that fact before he was confirmed to the Supreme Court?

“A person’s views on race are nobody else’s business but theirs.”

The analogy’s a little bit lurid, I’ll admit, but it’s nevertheless apt. A closeted gay woman not disclosing that fact to the public before taking a seat on the Supreme Court is as distressing to me as the closet Klan member would be to…well any decent person.

Read my post. If you don’t believe what I’ve said about living in the closet, then ask me or one of your gay friends.

Baroness: I hear you loud and clear.

My insistence on Kagan declaring her sexual orientation has everything to do with the cases that will almost certainly come before her as a Supreme Court justice. Those cases will bear on the civil rights of many millions of Americans who now live in de jure second-class citizenship, based on their gender- and sexual-non-conformity. And that class includes your humble scribe and maybe a lot of the people you know.

There are “rumors” from Harvard. There are “rumors” from her time in D.C. I don’t know if she is a lesbian and I didn’t claim to know that in my post. But if she is, indeed, a closeted lesbian, then she absolutely needs to come out. Right fucking now.

It is nightmarish to me to imagine a closeted gay person contributing to the decisions bearing on gay rights that almost certainly will come before her court, assuming she is confirmed. I know from my own experience how toxic and demented life in the closet can be.

If Kagan is gay, then that simply must be disclosed. If she isn’t, then that also must be disclosed. What’s the big deal? Seriously. Why is someone’s sexual orientation deemed off-limits in this type of Senate confirmation hearing? Living in the closet is as good an indication as any of how a Supreme Court nominee will rule on matters of deep concern to me and my family and friends. I am entitled to know this. And, once again, no one is putting a gun to Kagan’s head and insisting that she put herself forward as a Supreme Court nominee.

That was the gist of my post, and I stand by it.

P.S. I never once commented on Kagan’s supposedly “mannish” appearance. That’s all you, doll.

Skahammer: You make a couple of good points, but I have to ask you: Where is the ‘pretty compelling privacy interest’ in a Supreme Court just nominee?

Why aren’t we allowed to know about Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation, when being gay makes you a de jure second-class citizen in this country? Does that status have no bearing on how she would rule on important civil rights cases?

Elena Kagan is not being forced to put herself forward as a Supreme Court nominee. She is rumored to be gay. Let’s have her address that and then let’s be done with it.

Newt: But why is it such a big deal? Why is it “baseless speculation” to assume someone is gay, as if she were a pinko Commie or something. Why can’t Kagan just address this? What’s to be ashamed of?

Newt: Once again, I’m just going to ask simply why Kagan’s potential status as a de jure second class citizen in this country ought not to be drawn out in a Senate hearing.

Why is that off-limits?

PD: Thanks. I’m amending my post based on your comment.

Bookish: Love, of course. You’re totally right.

I’m a revolutionary and an idealist in this and many other ways. I don’t want any Supreme Court nominee to be quizzed on how flawed Roe v. Wade was but how she will, grudgingly, uphold it under the principle of stare decisis. I don’t want anyone to be quizzed on his sexuality because that might make him more or less likely to uphold Lawrence v. Texas when that case is inevitably challenged.

I firmly believe that Jeff Sessions should have been aborted.

I am heartsick about what’s going on in this country, especially about what’s been done to me and my loved ones (and that includes all of you Wordsmokers) by stupid, short-sighted American politicians. BP’s uncontrollable oil well in the Gulf occasionally makes me want to kill myself.

I am nevertheless going to flog the everloving fuck out of this Supreme Court nomination until Kagan sits her ass down on that bench. She will be confirmed, that’s clear. She won’t–and maybe won’t ever–come out, if she is indeed a lesbian, and she may or may not do great harm to this country while she’s on the Court.

But I’ve got to try. Some days, it’s the only thing that keeps me going.

ForwardMotion: Yes, it’s hard not to like “Shorty.” And thanks for your comments.

I think you’re right: The straights and homos talk past each other on this issue all the time.

LL: “Gender non-conforming” is a scholarly term that’s used by researches who study gender development in kids and its expression in adults. It wasn’t meant to imply that I personally hold some rigid notion of gender to which I have determined Kagan does not perform.

Identity politics will stop mattering when people are no longer assigned second-class citizenship based on who they are.

LT: “The fact of being closeted should not create a presumption of being anti-gay…”

It shouldn’t, my friend, but unfortunately it does. It may not be possible to understand that unless you’ve lived in the closet yourself.

Kagan’s already gone on record via the Senate Questionnaire that “there is no federal Constitutional right to gay marriage.”

I’ve got a right to know what’s informing that hateful posture. Closetedness is certainly one of its possible sources.

MRD: I said it may not be possible to know how destructive the closet is if you haven’t lived in it yourself. I understand if that pissed you off as a dick move. I almost didn’t leave it in there.

But I don’t think you would sit idly by while I spouted off on what it does to people to be abused by their caregivers–how it doesn’t affect your worldview or color some of your most deeply-seated beliefs–and that you are some kind of identity politics-obsessed jackass for even talking about it.

If I did those things but had never myself been through that experience, would you be okay with me saying over and over again that “it shouldn’t matter”? Or would you bring it up and say, simply, that yes it does matter and that maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about?

Let me ask you a hypothetical: Imagine if Kagan had been in and out of foster care and had been physically and sexually abused as a child by the people she was relying on to take care of her and love her. What if she refused to acknowledge or discuss this part of herself but held the following position “There is no federal constitutional right for adults who were physically and sexually abused as children to adopt a child”?

That’s a rough equivalent of what LGBT and gender non-conforming citizens are being asked to accept with Kagan, if she is indeed a closeted lesbian.

Unfun: Sexism. There is an absolutely ferocious series of comments on the Kagan posts at Digby’s Hullabloo from a commenter there named “Catherine” who called me among other things, a “dangerous fanatic,” a sexist, a woman-hater, and “a self-righteous white male ‘leftist.’”

Those shoes don’t fit me, except maybe that last one.

But you know me, I like to stir the pot. I apologize if I pissed you off.

LL: You’re thoughtful and passionate about what you’re saying, and that’s a good thing. I can’t speak for anyone else on this thread, but what you said and posted in your comment didn’t offend me in the slightest. I think you’re wrong about the politics of the closet not belonging in this discussion, but, as my father is fond of saying, we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that.

KK: Sexism, as I said to Unfun. Or perhaps “reverse sexism,” even though I despise that concept, as if intolerance always flows in one direction.

In this particular case, I am talking about blind support for and acceptance of a female nominee to the Supreme Court qua female, even though reasonable and thoughtful people ought to have deep misgivings about this nominee for reasons that have everything to do with her possible closeted gayness, her pathetically thin record of scholarship, the utter lack of any kind of jurisprudential record that would indicate how she might rule on the most important issues of the day, and nothing to do with her gender.

I happen to think that more women on the bench is almost always an unalloyed good thing. But it’s been my limited experience during this debate–and it’s all anecdotal–that some otherwise clear-thinking women, including the brilliant progressive blogger Digby–have been made utterly and unaccountably furious by this question of Kagan’s sexuality. Digby, for instance, views it as an underhanded attempt by dangerous, woman-hating fanatics to destroy an ambitious and successful woman. As a gay man and former closet case and second-class U.S. citizen, however, I happen to view the question of whether Kagan is a closeted lesbian as lying at the heart of her suitability to replace John Paul Stevens.

I think it’s a common-sensical concern that a lot of the people on this thread are minimizing in the name of political correctness. But that’s just me.

We don’t need to keep arguing about this unless you want to.

LL: As I said in my comment to Mama P., a self-identifying woman and a lawyer, I don’t understand why intelligent women would have this knee-jerk reaction to Kagan when there are so many sound reasons to be deeply concerned about her nomination.

You’re absolutely entitled to police my comments for political correctness, but that doesn’t change the fact that this has been a damned good discussion.

Helman: What have I said that’s insulting? Is it insulting to talk about race and gender and sexual orientation? Why, aside from some sacred cows that are long overdue for slaughter? I haven’t made any ad hominem attacks here. All I’ve done is explicate my thinking on this question, just like everyone else here.

It’s unfortunate but true that one’s status, whether that be a disfavored gender, a despised flavor of sexuality, or membership in a historically oppressed racial minority, determines the rights one is entitled to exercise in our society. You know that as well as I do. This shit is fucking codified.

I’m really disappointed to be getting the Helman scolding at this stage in the game, and I think you’re being unfair.

BJ: I want to be clear about something. I’m susceptible to good arguments. And the best argument contra what I said in my post and have repeatedly said in my comments was MilitantRubberDucky’s point:

By saying [Kagan's sexual orientation] matters, you’re making her the second-class citizen you don’t think she should be. As someone who is supposed to be against discriminatory actions because of sexual orientation, you sure are doing your level best to excuse why it’s acceptable to be done to her.

Now that made me think. And I explained to MRD in my response why I still thought this point wasn’t really quite right.

The rest of you have been coming back time and time again to the “it’s no one’s business/it shouldn’t matter” line of reasoning (Worrywart’s silly argument about infinite epistemologic regression doesn’t really count). But read my response to MRD to see why I find that argument to be both completely toothless and also vaguely insulting.

I respect everyone’s opinion here and I absolutely love how passionate everyone is about their points of view. I’ve laid out my thinking quite clearly. If you don’t like the fact that I have dismissed a lot of your arguments as unpersuasive, then maybe you ought to go back and rethink your arguments.

There’s no crying in debate. I’m not the judge here. And I certainly don’t expect to change anyone’s mind with my devastating logic and eloquence. Everyone is entitled to say her piece and make up her own mind about all this stuff. That’s why we’re here, right?

But to come at me with some kind of “derisive tone” argument at this point is really lame. If you don’t like my tone, then don’t keep reading me.