Kevin Drum of Mother Jones challenges uuber blogger Andrew Sullivan’s justification for prying into Attorney General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation. He challenges Sullivan’s further assertion that it’s actually homophobic not to pry.

Andrew Sullivan explains why he thinks it’s OK to ask public figures if they’re gay:

If someone’s entire private life is on the table except that, it’s a function of homophobia. Period. A gay person is free to adopt such a homophobic veil; but a reporter need not enable it. So when does Benjy Sarlin write a piece on his own magazine’s “ethics”?

Look. I get why Andrew feels this way. And if that really were the only thing off the table, he’d have a point. But here’s a short sample of other questions that are generally off limits when you’re interviewing public figures:

• So, have you ever had an affair?
• Do you masturbate when your wife isn’t around?
• Have you ever had a three-way?
• Do you download a lot of porn from the internet? Or do you prefer buying it old school on the newsstand?

• I think Asian guys are really hot. How about you?

Notice a trend? They’re all related to your sex life. And [unless the interviewee brings it up] they’re all generally off limits.

He said it here.

I think that’s about right. For better or worse (I agree slightly with Sullivan that it’s worse) sexual orientation is classified as a type of sex one can be interested in (i.e. part of a continuum that includes threeways, masturbation, and, say, oral sex) when instead sexual orientation more accurately categorizes who you’d want to do some or all of those activities (threeways, masturbation, oral sex, etc) with!

I’d disagree with Sullivan, though, that the confusion of categories is evidence of homophobia.

So even though I completely get his point, in defense of Sullivan I’m going to give Drum a very mild ding for not using even more bland but still quite off-limits questions such as “Do you use insertable weights when you do Kegels?” or “How long is your refractory period after ejaculation?”