Reply #74: yeah there's a meme no matter which way you look at it i guess... [View All]

[elana i am]

IMO elena kagan should do what's best for elena kagan. if i were to imagine myself in her position that would be my only consideration. if the obama admin. made staying closeted or coming out a condition of my being appointed i'd have to be certain that the condition can be reconciled with my conscience. beyond that i would approach being gay as a non-issue for the job qualifications and therefore no-one's business.

i'm going to co-opt the term "gay mafia" as a way of describing gay militants like perez hilton who out other gay people. then we have the "homophobe mafia". flip sides of the same ugly coin. homopobes being low-life asshats is a given. but what of the gay mafia? i'll use my second cousin as an example. she's gay and she's been ostracized by everyone in her family except her grandmother, her little sister and a few second cousins my age and younger. no one outed her, she had enough of hiding and outed herself. but if i was to pretend that one of her gay friends or a militant gay activist outed her, then they would have wrought unspeakable damage to a part of my extended family. her mom and all the other fundamentalist nuts in that side of the family went off the deep end. her younger sister, who adored her (and still does) is forbidden from having contact with her. her father is slowly coming around and they've seen each other a few times. her parents, having had disparate reactions, have become separated and headed for divorce. her grandmother is in the moderate stages of alzheimers and doesn't know from nothing, but my cousin is forbidden from seeing her as well. what if my cousin had decided to wait until her sister was an adult and her grandparents had passed on before she came out and some asshat of perez hilton's ilk came along and took that decision away from her?

i would hope that no gay people would hate on elena kagan for keeping her sexual identity a personal matter, as it should be. homophobes of course don't deserve any consideration, so if it were me, and i was not constrained by the the directives of the obama admin., i would refuse to say on principle simply because it's nobody's business. which leads me to another issue...our celebrity and sex obsessed culture. sexual identity is going to matter because we're all obsessed with what celebrity is sleeping with who. i don't see this going away anytime soon. i try my damnedest to avoid knowledge of the personal lives of celebrities, but i think i'm unfortunately unique that way. hopefully someday that will change.

anyway...i still think we're looking at another 20 or so years of homophobe attrition (by way of dying off, not conversion to a sane perspective) before being gay can truly become normalized and a non-issue.