Summary: a meditation on quiet practice vs. active closeting and why right-wing private peccadilloes almost always matter more than unannounced center- and progressive private practices.

In a news roundup post BarbinMD at DailyKos pointed out a ‘winger group that’s chosen a perilous tactic in its pursuit of Elana Kagan’s nomination

The American Family Association (hey, I didn’t name them) goes for flat-out bigotry in announcing their opposition to the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court:

It’s time we got over the myth that what a public servant does in his private life is of no consequence. We cannot afford to have another sexually abnormal individual in a position of important civic responsibility, especially when that individual could become one of nine votes in an out of control oligarchy that constantly usurps constitutional prerogatives to unethically and illegally legislate for 300 million Americans.

The stakes are too high. Social conservatives must rise up as one and say no lesbian is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. Will they?

Barb said it here

I might… sort of… almost… be willing to see the Kagan nomination dropped on the “private behavior matters “ rap if that organization would agree to drop all their own thoroughly disgraceful bedfellows.

Almost willing… but only almost, not actually willing.

Problem being that the majority of their cohorts who are covert pedophiles or prostitute customers or fetishists or adulterers or serially divorced or closeted “ex-homosexuals” or draft dodgers or scam-runners or would-be bomb-planting America-haters are fakes, frauds, and, especially, intentionally and vocally vicious because that’s their strategy for trying to pass! And therefore what they do in their private lives is significant indeed.

Meanwhile, though, whether Kagan turns out to be quietly gay or quietly straight her private life what she preaches is not at all inconsistent with what she practices.

Therefore unlike a man who heads an extremist anti-gay or “ex gay” organization while cheerfully employing male prostitutes, and unlike a man who’s believed in the sanctity of all four of his marriages before ruthlessly abandoning them, and unlike the man after man after man who seeks to punish infidelity and prostitution while committing infidelity with prostitutes, and so on through the litany of right-wing, um, inconsistencies between walk and talk, Kagan’s private life simply isn’t germane to her public acts or roles!

Therefore to trade away her nomination would therefore be unjust… even though the corresponding decimation of the ranks of the right wing such a deal would bring would benefit society enormously.

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Exceptions that help demonstrate (a.k.a. “prove”) the rule: Former prosecutor, attorney general, and governor Eliot Spitzer was a rare Democrat whose closeted behavior involved publicly prosecuting commercial sex workers while privately hiring them for sex. In that case his private practices conflicted with his public words and deeds — my formal definition of closeting — and therefore it mattered. Meanwhile, rumors that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham or newly “independent” Florida Governor Crist might be gay aren’t really worth pursuing because… while they appear to be deeply conservative and therefore I disagree with them on many, many issues, they don’t seem to have exploited or exacerbated their conservatism in pursuit of deepening their closets… and therefore their private practices probably don’t belong in the public domain.