Official Outings - NYT Magazine's take on the ethics of outing [View All]

[kweerwolf]

I have always believed that an elected official's private life is not a part of the public record. Before and after the Mayor Jim West episode, I have heard colleagues discuss outing legislators who oppose gay rights but are rumored to be gay. What are the ethics in this case? State Senator Ken Jacobsen, Seattle

Your colleagues may ethically out an official only if that official's being gay is germane to his policy-making. A person who seeks elected office, voluntarily entering the public arena, does surrender some claims to privacy. (Financial disclosure comes to mind.) Some, but not all. An official's private life should remain private unless he or she makes it relevant to a public position freely taken. A cross-dressing secretary of agriculture who voiced no opinion on the sexual high jinks of soybeans -- do legumes engage in high jinks? -- would not meet this standard; a gay state senator who opposed gay civil rights would. Similarly, the assault weapons stockpiled by a gun-control advocate would be pertinent; his nude trout-fishing would not be.

Identifying when this ambiguous standard has been met is admittedly difficult. Is a single vote on a single bill enough? My guideline is this: the more aggressively, the more centrally, an official participates in a policy struggle, the more reasonable it is to out him.

A counterargument could be made in defense of hypocrisy, or at least for its irrelevance: a policy should stand on its merits, not on its advocates' behavior. That may be so in the dispassionate discourse of academe (at least idealized academe), but in the hurly-burly of political life, the human factor is meaningful and often invoked by politicians themselves -- their military service, their religious observance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17ETHICIST.html