More on the Elena Kagan Lesbian Rumor

Dan82 · Apr 20, 2010

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/20/the-kagan-kerfuffle/

James Joyner captures my thoughts on the recent silliness pretty well. Basically, nobody comes out of this looking good.

First, CBS. Frankly, the journalist in me finds it sort of offensive that they were willing to publish serial plagiarist Ben Domenech on any topic—some things really ought to earn you a lifetime ban from respectable outlets. In the specific instance, I think Domenech himself can probably be forgiven for believing—as a whole lot of people did—that Kagan was out, and saying so in a tossed-off blog post. But CBS is supposed to fact check these things—see whether Kagan herself has actually acknowledged anything of the sort in print—before running with potentially controversial claims. There’s no real excuse for this to have run in the first place.

But the White House response has been phenomenally stupid on a number of levels. They could simply have said that Kagan has never publicly discussed the details of her private life either way, which would have been enough to establish that the CBS story overreached. By going further and asserting that Kagan is straight—though in the absence of a verbatim quote, it’s possible that a spox really just flubbed an attempt to deny the “openly” part—they’ve made it actually newsworthy if the claim turns out to be false. Moreover, as many have noted, responding as though being called a lesbian constitutes a “charge” is a stupid goof in 2010...
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More on the Elena Kagan Lesbian Rumor

Dan82 Full Member

Dan82
Full Member