So yesterday brought the very big news of President Obama's nomination of his Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, to the Supreme Court.
Obama's selection of Ms. Kagan basically assures the current nomination process will proceed as most have in the modern era: staid, heavily scripted, possibly punctuated by idle contretemps that ultimately ends with a beaming Kagan being administered the oath by Chief Justice Roberts.
Needless to say, I have a pretty zen attitude towards these things. I'm more interested, if anything, in people's hyperbolic reactions to these typically bland paragons of unbridled ambition than they themselves.
Case in point: the supremely obnoxious Andrew Sullivan. Unlike a great many of his detractors, what's bothers me about Sullivan is not his cloudy paranoia (Rock on!) but the hypocrisy of the polite liberal establishment that embraces him nonetheless. I'm not actually worried by Andrew talking endless shit about two of my girlfriends--Hillary, who does have a loathsome side to her, and Sarah. But what I usually resent about Andrew is the pointed criticism lobbed at anyone who dares to critique his boyfriend, Barry, outside the proper parameters of acceptable discourse.
And now this:
So read the title of one of Andrew's reactions to the Kagan nomination. *sigh* He continues:
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.
In a word, this is preposterous - a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should mean nothing either way.
And there we have it. Sullivan reminds me of the very annoying sort of armchair black nationalists that most black people might know all about. Sullivan's posture, here, means that sexual orientation (like race for the ABNs) defines a person to an enormous and oppressive degree. It, furthermore, should be a sure indication of a particular set of political objectives. And to be sure, the advancement of those objectives trumps all. It's the Perez Hilton approach to sexuality applied to politics.
With respect to what may possibly be Elena Kagan's obvious, but discreet and hushed, homosexuality, one should say... Who cares! This kind of bigotry is a tad different from the sort I'm accustomed to seeing in the political realm. Usually people like Sullivan (and the kindred-minded ABNs on the topic of race) are content with ridiculing and savaging closeted gay reactionaries who make for easy targets.
Sullivan expounds on his point this way:
To put it another way: Is Obama actually going to use a Supreme Court nominee to advance the cause of the closet (as well as kill any court imposition of marriage equality)? And can we have a clear, factual statement as to the truth? In a free society in the 21st Century, it is not illegitimate to ask. And it is cowardly not to tell.
Note the language--"to advance the cause of the closet." To be in the closet, he means, is an illegitimate and cowardly way to conduct one's affairs.
No, dear Andrew, needling people about the irrelevant issue of their private tastes, let's say, is indeed illegitimate. And tacky. One should hope this attitude is seen clearly for what it is: intolerance and a lack of imagination.
Honestly, I prefer Andrew the Gay Firebreather ranting about how much of a raging bitch Hillary is to this.
