Maureen Dowd elaborates on the homophobic, anti-feminist spin surrounding Elena Kagan’s sexuality. This time, she skips the satire. Once again, Dowd is right on:
But there were also the whispers — is she or isn’t she? — and the guys in the White House got all defensive, protesting too much that she isn’t. If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay, why shouldn’t one out of nine Supreme Court justices be? After all, President Obama has quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying that “it is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”
Kagan has told a friend in the West Wing that she is not gay, just lonely. Even so, that doesn’t mean her sherpas in the White House, in their frantic drive to dismiss the gay rumors, should be spinning a narrative around that most hoary of stereotypes: a smart, ambitious woman who threw herself into her work, couldn’t find a guy, threw up her hands, and threw herself further into her work — and in the process went from single to unmarried.
It’s inexplicable, given that this should be Kagan’s hour of triumph as potentially only the fourth woman ever to serve on the highest court.
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