Andrew Sullivan, ENDA, and Elena Kagan's sexuality

by Susan Marie Kovalinsky | May 14, 2010 at 05:27 pm

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Isn't the point of ENDA - the Employee Non Discrimination Act - that gender, race, and sexual orientation and identity have nothing to do with how one performs in their job or profession?

I have always believed the certain feminists, gays, and ethnic groups are doing a disservice to progress to hone in on the very thing which should be ignored. The person, the professional, is primary. Gender, race, and sexual orientation are secondary. Or should be. Identity politics is all wrong, and works against equality.

Andrew Sullivan , that venerable gay activist par excellence, is calling on Kagan to reveal that she is a lesbian. On his Daily Dish blog, on The Atlantic, he says, in his own words:

It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay ... and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively.
In a word, this is preposterous - a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should mean nothing either way.

Yet if it is secondary, why must she reveal it? Her voting tendencies can be found in her professional life and works. Why should her revealing she is gay automatically reveal she will vote always for gay marriage or other rights. Ideally, it should not.

LZ Granderson, OpEd writer for CNN Opinion blogs, states:

But to demand some sort of public clarification, as if sexual orientation is a barometer for how someone is going to do his or her job, has the same witch-hunt elements of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy many want to see overturned.

I would agree. Sullivan himself has been the victim of an "outing" in the past; gay advocate Michelangelo Signorile exposed Sullivan as being HIV positive. In his own defense, according to The Daily Beast, Sullivan said:

"This 'story' was fomented clearly by malice. It was spread anonymously. It was propagated by someone who made no pretense about his political loathing of me, and who has devoted a large part of his career to attacking me. It had and has no named sources and did not even rest in the end on some alleged hypocrisy. Yet within a couple of weeks of anonymous Internet gossip, it is in the mainstream press and I am required to respond. Something is rotten here. Privacy, simply put, is under siege."

Now Beltway Confidential reveals that Sullivan, shamed by his critics, has given up his crusade to out Kagan.