Law Professor Bridget Crawford says

Earlier this evening New York Representative Anthony Weiner admitted that indeed the infamous underwear bulgewas his.   Weiner held a press conference in which he acknowledged that he had sent an underwear-clad picture of himself with an erection to a female Twitter follower.  He also admitted to other inappropriate internet flirting and sexually explicit cyber-talk with up to six women — before and after his marriage to Huma Abedin.  SeeTime Magazine‘s blog coverage of the press conference here.

Representative Weiner has said that he does not intend to resign from Congress.  I suppose he thinks that poor personal judgment does not disqualify him from office. After all, there are rich examples on both the left and the right of politicians who have made stellar contributions to the public good, in spite of making some terrible choices in their personal lives.

I am inclined to agree with Representative Weiner’s (implied) position that a lapse in personal judgment such as this one does not necessarily mean that he is unfit to do his job.  After all, what one of us has not made a poor personal choice?  Ok, maybe not that particular one…maybe not that particular type…but stone-throwing always is a lose-lose proposition.  I suspect that if attorneys were disbarred routinely for making bad personal decisions — especially about sexual matters, internet communications, or the overlap of the two — there would be far fewer attorneys in every state.

Troublesome to me is that Representative Weiner lied when asked initially whether the picture was of him.  (The Congressman claimed that he couldn’t say with “certitude” that the photo was or was not of him; Weiner asserted that his Twitter account had been hacked.)  Did politicians learn nothing from the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky debacle?  President Clinton was impeached for lying under oath, not for sexual infidelity.  To be sure, Representative Weiner was not under oath when talking to the press, but the damage would have been more contained if he had owned his mistake from the get-go.

Source: Feminist Law Professors

I certainly appreciate Prof. Crawford's tolerance and grace, and her acknowledgement of even admirable people's personal failures.

I on the other hand am feeling decidedly non-tolerant and graceful about at least three things.

1) When friends and supporters are going out on a limb defending you against accusations of things you really actually did you should own up to it.  Or at the very least they won't have much credibility when you need support for something you actually didn't do.  And at the very most because by embarrassing the shit out of you they're going to lose interest in supporting you at all.

2) I suppose I ought to be nettled that "here in the 21st Century blah blah blah" people feel they have to be circumspect and/or outright lie about sexual canoodling.  But that's not actually what this appears to be about -- it's about some guy sending what appear to have been unsolicited intimate photos to someone who wasn't expecting them.  That's more like, um, harassment.  If it turns out that the image was sent in the context of mutual and mutually-escalating cross-country cyber flirting then, eh, then we can talk about who should or shouldn't care.  Until then it's more a question (as I briefly noted in a defense of Weiner last week) about Rep. Weiner's prior associations with standard "good old Congressman" sexual harassers.

3) Great Adam's Umbilical Chord but what's with it with guys sending unsolicited photos of their fucking dicks?  There's a whole grand spectrum of Photos That Don't Work, which ranges from said unsolicited dick photos to unsolicited "porn for women" style baseboard-cleaning photos.  At the risk of sounding non-judgmental though?  Don't send any of them unsolicited, m'kay?

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.

—-

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.

Three recent and/or current events provide a nice platform for examining if and when outing someone over their sexual orientation or inclination would be appropriate.

Disgraceful Outing

I’m pretty tolerant of outing figures who take stands against their own closeted situations. I’m not at all tolerant of outing people for one thing simply because they support or oppose an unrelated issue. So it’s particularly annoying to hear from Gabriel Arana of TAPPED that…

Looks like the nativist group Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC) is getting desperate. William Gheen’s rant at a rally “outing” Sen. Lindsey Graham, who supports comprehensive immigration reform, has gone viral. Though Graham has said repeatedly that he is not gay (just single), ALIPAC insists on pushing this line. The organization sent out a press release praising Gheen for correcting the “information imbalance”:

When you have a U.S. Senator from such a conservative state like South Carolina working hand in hand with Obama and New York liberals like Senator Chuck Schumer to pass an Amnesty bill for illegal aliens, there is something very wrong.

So ALIPAC thinks the only possible reason Graham could support immigration reform is because liberals are holding his “alternative lifestyle” over his head? The logic here is so bizarre I have trouble seeing how Gheen could believe it himself.

Arana points out that Gheen’s using the exact intimidation tactic he’s accusing pro-immigration activists of using. (No surprise there since projection backed up by self-loathing is central to conservative character.)

Graceless Outing

If Mr. Gheen’s behavior is disgraceful, Babette Josephs’ insinuations about her primary candidate Gregg Kravitz was merely graceless. Talking Points Memo’s Rachel Slajda says longtime state legislator Babette Josephs is backing away from her prior accusation that the young man challenging her in the upcoming primary in her heavily LGBT Philadelphia district is straight!

Kravitz, who says he’s bisexual, is currently partners with a woman. Josephs considered that enough of a “gotcha” to call him a liar and brag that “I outed him as a straight person.” According to TPM’s Slajda she now says “I don’t even care, because a person’s sexuality has nothing to do with any of this.”

Which, of course, is perfectly true! Josephs herself appears to be the most actively pro-LGBT legislator in Pennsylvania even though she also appears to be 100% heterosexual. And meanwhile Kravitz might not end up being as effective a legislator even if he’s not 100% hetero.

Still, it’s approximately as graceless to assume that having, or having had, an opposite-sex partner makes one heterosexual as it would be to assume that a former or current partner of the same sex makes one homosexual.

Barely Regrettable Outing

On the other hand, when it comes to cases where a legislator or other public figure is aggressively and actively antagonistic to their own orientation or inclination, as with the closeted sex-purchasing of anti-prostitution activists David Vitter’s or Randall Tobias, or as with aggressive anti-homosexual activist legislator Roy Ashburn’s homosexuality, or family-values stalwart John Ensign’s affair? I feel pretty comfortable saying that when you make it your business it becomes everybody’s business what your business really is.

Well this is kind of weird. Ampersand of Alas, a blog passes along one of those classic gotcha stories that combine double standards, overzealous prosecutors, and young people exchanging nude photography…

Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all.

From a pretty good link-roundup post here.

... that for some reason I foolishly started following links back through the story. And discovered that, as they say on Facebook, “it’s complicated.” There’s more to it than will fit in any two-sentence summary.

Let’s get the willy-waiving policeman out of the way first: According to The Agitator (the site Ampersand links to) a Pennsylvania police officer was reinstated after an arbitrator determined he was improperly fired because his employers (the police supervisor he exposed himself to?) didn’t follow “progressive disciplinary guidelines, which involve a series of verbal and written warnings.” (That would be “progressive” in the procedural rather than political sense.)

The child-porn conviction business, though, just keeps getting deeper and weirder.

Most surface/gotcha-level view of the story: man convicted earlier for possessing naked photos of his then-17-year-old wife is sent to prison for 3 years for failing to notify a sex-offender registry of a change of address. Extra irony/quirk/outrage/overreach/whatever: his now-adult wife and child they had together are now an impoverished single-mother family and will remain so till the husband gets out of prison around 2012. Ouch, right?

Well, yes, ouch. The next complication, though, from the Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle after the man was originally convicted: in 2003 a 23-year-old man has a hotel-room party with his 17-year-old girlfriend who takes pictures of the two of them having sex, and of two other girls, 15 and 16, kissing, touching, and showering naked. Girlfriend swears she took the photos and made a photo album of them and then gave it to him.

Ok, that’s more complicated but still way more of a sorrow-than-anger situation. (Update: Making the very big assumption that since court and news reports don’t say otherwise that contact was limited to his fiance and she really did take all the photos. But in current comments Sungold is persuading me to lean towards her interpretation, in which case eww, and throw the book at him.)

Except there’s the next level complication: The man allegedly kept the photo album in his vehicle for a year. It didn’t turn up till he had a traffic accident and a police officer found the album in his car. Oh, and they didn’t just charge him with child porn they also charged him with providing alcohol to minor.

Yeah, I’m starting to feel a little sympathy fading too here. Tough, and all that, but still, WTF, right? Well, yeah.

It gets even more complicated though.

The police officer who found the photo album was the man’s brother in law (or possibly his step-brother.)

The brother-in-something held on to the album for a year before someone else on the police force found it in his desk. When police searched his computer they found 120 other photos of naked minors.

That too got complicated. The brother-in-something was charged with possession of child-pornograhy but, since the photo album was evidence against the original man he wasn’t charged for possessing that.

It gets even more complicated: first, it sounds like the man and his erstwhile partner are separated. So it’s not clear what’s going on with her. And comments by a local in one of the articles said the brother-in-something eventually escaped conviction, which sounds like a bit more of a scandal — the photos aren’t characterized but it doesn’t sound like they were of people he was involved with.

But wait! It gets even more complicated! The brother-in-something was actually convicted and sentenced to six months house arrest. For possessing those 120 computer photos. Oh, and peeping in windows. So there you go.

Meanwhile the original man, having served his original sentence, is still back in prison for three years under the state’s Megan’s Law provisions for failing to let authorities know he’d moved.

So end of the story? Yes, it’s scandalous that a different police officer was reinstated after exposing himself to his superior and a bystander.

And yes it’s on-balance unfortunate that the man went to prison a second time after serving what may have been a shorter first sentence for exercising what could only optimistically be called really, really, really bad judgment and somewhat more generously for canoodling with someone still a minor but past the age of consent and… her two minor friends who certainly weren’t. And not-at-all generously, for either getting minor children drunk, having sex with one of them, and taking and keeping naked photos with them, or, nearly as bad, getting drunk and naked with minor children and keeping the resulting photos. No really good way to spin that and… it’s not really clear why one would bother.

I’ve still got questions, though, about double standards on police vs. civilian conduct. Because one final Reading Eagle story, on the conviction of the brother-in-something adds one final complication. Turns out it wasn’t the brother-in-something who found the photo album in the first man’s truck after an accident. Instead some other officer found it and turned it over to the brother-in-something. Who put it in his desk. Where it was discovered a little more than a year later by someone else. Who, if I’ve got the chronology right, may actually have been investigating allegations of window peeping. But, having finally seen the light of day, resulted in charges against the original man for child porn, the brother for otherwise-unrelated child porn… but not withholding evidence… and… what?... disciplinary charges? Tampering with evidence charges? Nothing at all? ...for the officer who handed the photo album to the brother-in-law.

Point being that yeah, in its bare bones the story fits that two-line gotcha, “Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all.” But where the rest of the stories (I’m just a regular Paul Harvey, eh?) ought to raise even more eyebrows.