Got your attention, didn't I?
Why does that crazy Senator from the midwest keep saying that? Loudly. With such judgment? Makes me want to pull my hair out. It not that he says he is not gay. (After all, I'm not gay, either.)
It's the way he says it.
Dude, you were in trouble for soliciting sex in a public restroom. You'd be in just as much trouble if the sex was solicited from a woman. (Or, at least, you should be.) Gay is not the problem.
I don't know if he is innocent or guilty. But I have learned a lot about him from the tone of his denial. I just wish the news would quit replaying it, because it's giving me a headache.
Etcetera.
4 comments:
I really must be out of sync in the news world, because I haven't even seen that... oh, my... I must start paying attention to this world.
I totally agree!
Although I can't help think he doth protest too much...
Seriously. He is saying "I'M NOT GAY." Like being gay is a problem, or a bad thing (I guess to some it is, but even to a conservative like me it's not at all). He keeps sidestepping the whole issue--you tried to pay someone for sex. Idiot. He could just as easily gone into a bar and gotten some from anybody. And probably for free!
I admit that, even though I'm a liberal and therefore am supposed to be gleeful at a Republican's demise, I'm rather of two minds on the topic.
On the one hand, I really don't mind if the senator's sex life is kept nice and private. It's not my business. And while I'm not a huge fan of anonymous sex in bathrooms, the honest truth is that, if straight men could go into a bathroom and periodically have sex with a woman, the line of people waiting would go out the door and around the airport terminal. And so, in some sense, it's even okay with me if a senator has a sex life that I don't fully approve of as long as it is consentual between adults.
On the other hand, of course, having sex in public is against the law. That really is relevant to public service. However, how great of a crime is it? It is a misdemeanor, right, not a felony. I don't know where exactly the dividing line is between breaking the law with a parking ticket law and breaking the law in such a way that you are unfit to hold public office. Don't most couples at some point in the relationship try to do a little hanky panky outside, where it is actually illegal, but you hope no one sees you?
I can't help but think the reaction really is in large part based upon the sex being same sex sex. If the senator was caught with a female lover in the airplane bathroom (the mile high club), there would be a very different reaction than if caught with a male lover. It still might crash his electability -- see Gary Hart, for instance -- but the reaction would be less.
Truly, I'm lost on these issues, I confess.
My last thought is that the senator may not truly be "gay". My understanding has always been that human sexuality is a lot more fluid, let's make that variable, than we like to discuss. Since at least the Kinsey report in the 50s, we've had data that some large percentage of men, say 20%, 30%, have had some sort of physical encounter with another man some time in their life. But it isn't clear at all that all such men are all gay or even truly bisexual. They are men very attracted to women who also tried physical with a man once. I don't know. I always take "gay" to mean a basic, lasting attraction to someone of your own sex with feelings of love and desire. The senator's actions could be a repressed version of that, or they could be a small sexual thrill he gets on the side with little more meaning to him than physical sensation. Of course, we can define being gay to include such actions, but it'd still be a very different type of being gay than someone who falls in love with men throughout his life.
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