Bob Shrum: Is It A Smear For Kagan To Be Called Gay?

Bob Shrum: Is It A Smear For Kagan To Be Called Gay?
Copyright by David Mixner
May 17 2010
http://www.davidmixner.com/2010/05/bob-shrum-is-it-a-smear-for-kagan-to-be-called-gay.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DavidMixnerCom+%28DavidMixner.com%29

Shrum If I had a dollar for every person who called me to ask if Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is a lesbian, I would be indeed a rich man. The phone has been ringing off the hook with journalists seeking the answer, friends in the community swearing she is a lesbian and friends in the community swearing she isn't gay. Quite honestly, who really gives a damn if she is gay or not and what does that have to do with her qualifications for the Supreme Court?

This gay baiting witchhunt from the radical right is only matched in its ugliness by the Administration claiming that charges she is gay a dirty smear. As I have seethed watching the White House fight the 'smear', I came across my good friend Bob Shrum's column and was delighted to see an articulate and powerful 'calling out' of this type of politics on both sides. In his column "Rescuing Elena Kagan From Smears" on TheWeek.com, he nails it on the head:

Some of the reactions to Elena Kagan’s ascent toward the Supreme Court reflect a shameful prejudice and an entrenched partisanship that say less about her qualifications than about the imperfections of America and the ugliness of our politics.

Shrum continues:

But it’s not just the unproved allegation, it’s also the administration’s unthinking pushback that reinforces one of the last acceptable strains of prejudice in our society. Would it be a “smear” to label a Supreme Court nominee Jewish, Catholic, or Hispanic—categories that, alongside outright sexism and racism, define the history of discrimination in this country? It was less than a century ago that the confirmation of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of Supreme Court justices and the first Jew ever to sit on the court, was fiercely contested not only because he was liberal, but because he was different.

To rebut a charge as a “smear” is to accept the underlying premise—that if it were true, there would be something wrong here. Yet that is precisely the tactic of Kagan’s assigned handlers. This week, they rushed out her law school roommate to testify: “I know she’s straight.” Why, Kagan even “dated” back then. Enter former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (presumably not at the behest of the White House) to remember their days together at Princeton: “I did not go out with her, but other guys did.”

Thus does publicity-seeking aimed at redemption descend to the level of farce. Who cares what Spitzer recalls—except in this case to conclude that Kagan dodged a bullet? How can a roommate of decades ago possibly know her orientation now, or be sure of what it was then?

Then there are the fundamental questions: Why should this matter—and why should the Obama White House, of all places, react to an attack by, in effect, validating its anti-gay point? The right response, in a society and from an administration committed to equality, is that Kagan should be judged on her substantive qualifications; that all Americans, even Supreme Court nominees, deserve to be treated with a dignity that doesn’t degrade them for their race, or faith, or nationality, or sexual identity.

The president obviously wants the easier road to Kagan’s confirmation; fine, but along the way, don’t throw principle into the ditch. Don’t give in to the merchants of prejudice, who are also now arguing that her sexual identity aside, Kagan is at least a gay fellow traveler.