The Times has a report that the hound dogs are going after Elena Kagan because she doesn't particularly take ethnicity into consideration when hiring. Good. Racism cuts both ways.
The "lesbian" issue drives me nuts. She is or she isn't. It turns out she isn't. Either way, it's purely irrelevant and no argument I've seen convinces me otherwise. If you still want to scratch that silly itch, what WaPo's Ruth Marcus has to say is what I'd say -- if the subject didn't make me boil over.
From my (straight, married mother) point of view, a gay justice would be a benefit to the court and the country. To the country because it would speed up the inevitable: acceptance of gay Americans in all walks of life. To the court because -- as with any additional perspective -- an openly gay justice would add to the richness of the court's understanding of cases, particularly gay rights cases, that come before it.
But Kagan isn't gay, for all the baseless chatter to the contrary. When this chatter seeped into the mainstream media a few weeks ago, I was reluctant to join in on a topic that seemed unnecessarily intrusive, boiling down, as it does, to the question: So if she's not gay, then why isn't she married? Now that she's the nominee, however, it seems that the subject isn't going away anytime soon.
The charming picture of Kagan at the bat that the Wall Street Journal ran on its front page the other day has been assailed by some gay rights activists as Rupert Murdoch's coded warning about Kagan's sexuality. I thought the picture, from a University of Chicago faculty game, made her look like more of a real person and less of a brainiac. Memo to conspiracy theorists: Straight women can play softball, too. Sometimes a softball bat is only a softball bat.
Kagan's law school roommate (and my good friend) Sarah Walzer, went on the record in an interview with Politico: "I've known her for most of her adult life and I know she's straight," Walzer said. "She dated men when we were in law school, we talked about men -- who in our class was cute, who she would like to date, all of those things. She definitely dated when she was in D.C. after law school, when she was in Chicago -- and she just didn't find the right person."
There are gender-based undertones to the Kagan discussion, but it is more complicated than simple sexism: that we assume an unmarried woman in her 40s or 50s "must be" a lesbian. Truth is, there is much the same gossip about unmarried and never-married men in public life. Imagine a David Souter nomination in the era of unrestrained blogging. Speculation about the meaning of his bachelor status would have been rampant -- and online.
The part where gender enters the discussion involves the underlying reasons. I don't know any single men of a certain age who would have preferred to have gotten married. I know many single women who would have preferred that their lives had worked out differently.
Whenever this subject comes up, it seems clear that the motivations of those who make sexuality an issue are much murkier than the motives of those who treasure discretion and privacy. The sexuality police strike me as horribly narrow and prejudiced. They remind me very much of privileged whites I grew up with who whispered and winked about "Jews" or "a touch of the tar-brush."
