Drum is confused:
I don't get this. A compulsion not to simply parrot the conventional wisdom or pull your punches I understand. But isn't silence ever an option? There's no rule that says every passing thought has to be memorialized in a blog post, is there?
No (even though the Dish publishes almost 300 posts a week). But when a story is the story of the day and when your own immediate take - and that of almost every gay and lesbian person I know (and every Google searcher on the planet) - is: we have a lesbian! it becomes dishonest to keep pretending you are not thinking this. You think I had an option to spend last week twiddling my thumbs, nervously whistling like bi-curious Butters? Even if I were silent, that would be a statement of sorts. Remember Trig? Yeah, my initial stunned silence really threw people off that scent, didn't it?
The best columnist on this, so far, has been Maureen Dowd. She's able to convey the hapless cluelessness of the Obama Straight Boys' Club when it comes to female sexuality and the closet:
White House officials were so eager to squash any speculation that Elena Kagan was gay that they have ended up in a pre-feminist fugue, going with sad unmarried rather than fun single, spinning that she’s a spinster. You’d think that they could come up with a more inspiring narrative than old maid for a woman who may become the youngest Supreme Court justice on the bench.
At this point, they're just desperate for anything but gay. And it's that maneuver that I find offensive. Axelrod et al. couldn't even come up with a defusing Seinfeldian quip - "She's heterosexual, not that there's anything wrong with that." And, yes, Maureen, they do protest too much:
If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay, why shouldn’t one out of nine Supreme Court justices be?
But I have learned something from the way Emmanuel, Obama, Gibbs et al. have handled this: if a potential judicial nominee were openly gay, they'd have no chance of being on a short-list, let alone selected for SCOTUS.
And the lesson this administration is clearly sending to young lesbian girls is: if you want to be a Supreme Court Justice, just stay in the closet. We wouldn't dream of nominating you if you weren't.
(Photo: Jim Watson/Getty.)