Feast of St. Domitilla.*
Com’on, we traditionalists are told by the liberals who strive to refashion our culture: honesty in sexual orientation is essential. Damn you old guard people who by your discrimination have forced gays to huddle in the closet! Okay, then why don’t the liberals start by defining the orientation of Elena Kagan, the Obama selection for the Supreme Court. Oh no-no-no, not so fast they say. About all other facets of this nominee the White House press office has been forthcoming. Things like she loves softball, that she would be the eighth Jewish appointee to the Court in history and the third to sit on the bench with this current Court.
But on whether Elena Kagan is a lesbian or not the White House is fudging. The first one to bring the question out in the open was not a conservative blue-nosed Puritan but Andrew Sullivan, the Brit blogger who is himself an articulately professed gay (and a Catholic, too, who maintains he still can receive the Eucharist while opposing a key tenet of Church dogma). Sullivan, an exponent of sexual orientation being made public, has said that if one asks about Kagan’s proclivities during confirmation, the questioner should not be pilloried by being called a homophobe.
The second news source to bring up the question was, ironically, the CBS-News blog. It said defiantly that Kagan is a lesbian and declared that she will be “the first gay Justice.” David Souter has been dismissed since he for all practical purposes has been as asexual as a sterile gerbil…one so boring that it puts you to sleep zzzzzzz even imagining that he has a sex life (I have trouble even imagining his forebearers getting to the denouement of conceiving such a nerd). Souter was a joke played upon the George H. W. Bush White House by the wily then New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman who told Bush’s chief of staff New Hampshireman John Sununu that he had a guy who could easily be confirmed to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement of liberal icon William Brennan.
He is a solitary guy who lives in the woods of New Hampshire with his Mom said Rudman. Gullible Sununu and his boss President Bush bought it and later Rudman…a true left-tinted raspy-voiced wise guy who got elected as a decoy Republican… dined out on the story of how he gulled the dumb bunnies of the White House and put it a stealth nominee who became as dependable a liberal vote as Brennan himself—albeit not so colorful. In fact, if you were to take a photo of him…why I don’t know…it would likely not come out. But I digress. Back to the CBS News blog writer.
The White House, determined to maintain that Kagan is not a lesbian (which contradicts its own policy of glorifying the diversity of sexual gratifications) insisted that the CBS guy withdraw his statement. He did, writing: “I have to correct my text to say that Kagan is apparently still closeted—odd because her female partner is rather well known in Harvard circles.” Of course she is but the White House rises above principle whenever a congressional vote is taken and it is important to maintain the point that Kagan is just another 50-year-old who has never married because she is so devoted to the law.
If they wish to present that image, someone should have done something with her severely mannish hair bob which resembles every other single woman in the audience at a Melissa Etheridge concert.
Senate Republicans are mum about the issue, of course but there are legitimate queries that beg for further development. The biggest one was Kagan’s war against military recruitment on the Harvard campus where she was the $400,000 plus dean of the law school. On Oct. 6, 2003 she publicized a letter “to the Harvard Law Community” which complained against what she called “the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy” of don’t ask, don’t tell. Not only did she complain but she shut down the recruitment altogether.
The law was passed and signed during the Clinton administration, the same administration Kagan served as an associate White House counsel so why she persists in calling it a “military policy” I don’t know. As the lawyer she is purported to be she should know it is…until it is changed…the official policy of the United States government.
Here is what she wrote: “The military [sic] deprives many men and women of courage and character from having the opportunity to serve their country in the greatest way possible. This is a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order.”
See how strongly she feels about this? Again, on Sept. 28, 2004: “The military’s [sic] recruitment policy is both unjust and unwise.” On March 7, 2006: “I hope that many members of the Harvard Law community will accept the Court’s invitation to express their views clearly concerning the military’s [sic] discriminatory employment policy.”
If the law is changed by Congress and goes to the Supreme Court, she could well be one of the justices. Wanna bet how she would vote? Wanna bet she won’t recuse herself on an issue she feels so passionately about?
______________________________ *: St. Domitilla [1st Century]. Her full name was Flavia Domitilla and she was the wife of a Roman consul, Flavis Clemens, as well as daughter of Emperor Domitian’s sister. Of such royal lineage it was a distinct shock when she converted to Catholicism along with her husband. Her husband was martyred and afterwards she was banished to the lonely isle of Ponza. But when she arrived there and flatly refused to offer homage to the gods, she was burned to death.
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