“why does she have to have a sexuality at all?”

May 11th, 2010

I like that question!

Here’s how Richard Kim ends his very lucid post in The Nation.

I don’t know if Elena Kagan sleeps with women or men. I don’t know if she sleeps with anyone at all. I don’t care. What I do know is that she has never claimed to be a lesbian, that she’s never spoken out in the first-person as an advocate of gay rights and that she has never publicly discussed a romantic relationship with a woman. Gay isn’t some genetic or soulful essence; it’s a name you call yourself–and Kagan has not done that. So in my book, case closed. Elena Kagan is not gay. Is she straight? I don’t know, and again, I don’t care. Why does she have to have a sexuality at all?

In a way, the mystery about her sexuality mirrors the mystery about her legal philosophy. We just don’t know a whole lot. The Senate and the press have the right and responsibility to interrogate her about her legal opinions—not about her sex life.

*Actually, it’s in The Nation’s blog, which they call The Notion, which always seems kinda funny to me because it’s what I always called The Nation when I’d draw it in my comic strip.