"The O'Donnell camp—with an assist from the National Organization of Women—issues a non-denial denial, condemns Gawker for running the story, and charges sexism."
1) She didn't condemn anything. She condoned.
2)The NOW statement which she adopted and endorsed called her "unfit for office."
3) Her own statement used the phrase "Coons goons" which is what I want HiredGoons to change his name to.
I'd take the idea of "slut-shaming" more serious in this case if there was an element of sexism here that doesn't more applicably sit smack in the middle of regular-everyday-political scandal stories.
If you Venn diagrammed the two, it would be a tiny circle completely inside a huge circle. So in this story we find all the ordinary prurience, all the latent American puritanism/hedonism split, all the messed up moralizing hypocrisy that makes up American political scandals is found here. There's very little new. But it seems to be emerging into people's minds as total sexism because it rings a hidden bell. I happen to think defenses of O'Donnell are a pretty interesting form of hidden gender issues in themselves – how an anti-feminist, anti-choice, anti-gay politician is being given a pass on this scandal precisely because of her gender. It's being made SPECIFICALLY sexist when it's actually fairly political and it's that specificity that makes this whole story seem unusual to me.
I mean, we have diagrams of stains on blue dresses, we struggle through every sartorial detail of Larry Craig's washroom sex statements (wide pants!). We know who slept with whom in the Spitzer affair, which people had their socks on. This very blog posted once about how Spitzer once slept with three hookers in one night (pruuuurient!!!).
I guess my point is this: there's no element or fact in this story that's any MORE demeaning than any other political scandal. If you replaced O'Donnell with a male figure, it would read in precisely the same way. That fact in itself makes me hesitant to see sexism.
When you're looking past the simplest answers, the reason might be that you just can't accept those as what YOU want. Maybe there's an agenda that your own mind is grinding away on?
Yup, yup. Not quite sure why that's a response to my comment, but yup.
To me this seems pretty simple:
1) We have a candidate who claims her sexual conduct qualifies her for the office she's seeking.
2) It appears that said conduct doesn't square with reality.
3) It's fair to point this out, the same way it's fair to point out when a candidate claims their financial savvy qualifies them for the office they're seeking, when evidence suggests that they're not actually financially savvy.
4) The Gawker post is still a gross, inappropriate example of how to point it out.
I was going to reply specifically to you, and then forgot about it, and then went back to the box to make a regular comment, and forgot it was still set to reply…
But on the plus side, I got to say \"went back to the box\" with a straight face.
The thing is, I didn't think that the Spitzer, Clinton, or Craig stories were particularly relevant either. I guess that at least with those three there were various degrees of actual illegal activity by actual elected officials. This, though, is a case of a lunatic Senate candidate who one time may have made out with a douchebag on Halloween.
These kinds of stories are a step toward limiting politics to only the people who have led the very most boring and calculated lives.
Some of the liberal people on Twitter I follow were absolutely outraged by this Gawker story. I thought it was weird that politically liberal O\'Donnell despiers would jump to this priggish, anti-masturbation, gay-hating joke\'s defense, but then I remembered: It\'s is a lady thing.
I mean analytically, this is not that different than Larry Craig\'s bathroom escapades.
It's like when Jerry Brown called Meg Whitman a whore in a private conversation. Even though she is a "whore" in the same sense that Jerry is a "puppet" which she calls him publicly in her ads. Different words but the same meaning. I guess double standards cut both ways.
@kitten: Not that it makes much difference if I'm right (and I'm just too lazy to actually look it up), but I think it was Brown's aide who made that comment. I'm only posting this so someone can tell me if I'm wrong (which is sort of like looking it up).
No. O\'Donnell is like Craig because she has run her campaign in part on a retrograde sex- and sexuality-based platform. Just because she\'s a lady doesn\'t excuse her hypocrisy. This kind of response from righteously outraged O\'Donnell defenders seems a bit, um, sexist to me.
It turns out O\'Donnell likes rolling around naked with other people just like the rest of us!
You're confusing her hypocrisy with the way the way this disclosure was made, which is what people are pissed off about. You don't have to excuse her hypocrisy to find that this disclosure was a particularly low moment for our political discourse. The episode was revealed anonymously and in ways that were not designed simply to reveal her as a hypocrite but in ways designed to degrade her as a person.
O\'Donnell\'s entire political career is designed to degrade other people as people: Gays, women who get pregnant and have abortions, and people who masturbate or just enjoy sex. This pearl-clutching over the Gawker piece is misguided, although I do agree that it would have been far better if it hadn\'t been anonymous.
But as far as I\'m concerned, O\'Donnell has reaped what she\'s sown on this one. What\'s good for the goose…
Really, it's not like a notable chunk of our political discourse — and especially during campaign season — doesn't revolve around degrading people as people.
What's interesting, or telling, is: There is this huge group of people politically opposed to O'Donnell who have risen to her defense, more or less. Basically, they're saying, "She might be my enemy, but I don't think she should be treated this way." That's not a bad thing! Even if you think they're misguided, they're erring on the side of compassion.
Where it gets problematic is that when the situation is reversed, there doesn't seem to be much reciprocation. As some folks noted the other day, not a huge chorus of right-wingers condemning, you know, the head-stomping.
Fair enough. But then why should Larry Craig have been treated the way he was for simply looking for a good time in an airport bathroom? Why should John Ensign be treated the way he has for having an affair? Why should Eliot Spitzer have been treated the way he was for hiring a sex worker?
If you're a public political figure and your platform includes some or all of the following: "family values," or "anti-gay," or "pro-life," or "tough on crime," then your queerness, your adultery, your sexual behavior, or your law-breaking is news, plain and simple.
O'Donnell is one of these demented born-again virgin types who supports abstinence education, hates queers and wants the government to be able to force pregnant women to carry their pregnancies to term.
The fact that O'Donnell's been humiliated in the public sphere for her entirely human shaggy pussy and sexual desire is the least of what she deserves. But it's a good start.
Where was the outrage from you and the rest of the scolds when O'Donnell added "the sanctity of life" to her campaign platform? Where was the outrage when she discussed pornography and spoke of living a "righteous lifestyle"?
The inexplicable hand-wringing over this O'Donnell stuff is probably the best example of liberals "not being able to find their keys," to paraphrase Michael Moore.
Oh, I'm not outraged over what has happened to Christine O'Donnell. I think the Gawker piece was an icky way of exposing her inconsistency, and therefore somewhat ineffective. (Not that this is surprising. Denton's primary interest is not the public good but garnering pageviews.) But I also think if you get into politics these days, hey, you run the risk of having icky stuff happen to you. Still, regardless of what I think, Honest Engine's assessment seems accurate to me: People aren't upset on O'Donnell's behalf because she got called out; they're upset because of the form the calling-out took.
Anyway, my point was just that the people you're upset with, the liberals defending O'Donnell — what they're doing is really sort of the opposite of what she has done. Whereas she says, essentially, that people need to conduct themselves a certain way, but that an exception should be made for her, they're saying no one deserves to have something like the Gawker post written about them, even a person they don't like.
So: The liberal outrage on behalf of O'Donnell actually stems from an attempt to hew to a moral code — a compassionate moral code — which is something, I think, to be proud of! The problem is, the folks on O'Donnell's side don't reciprocate. Their criteria for whether they'll defend someone has nothing to do with an objective moral code and everything to do with whether they like the person. And that seems to be working out pretty well for them, strategically speaking.
It's an interesting problem. Do those of us who believe in holding to a moral code abandon that belief in the hope that it will help us gain political power? If so, we probably just make the fighting worse, and even if we do gain power, by our own former standards we don't deserve it. On the other hand, it does suck to be the reasonable namby-pambies who keep trying to love our enemies and getting kicked in the head for it.
But it is relevant that a "chaste," supposedly 'family values'-embracing sexual moralizer has now been revealed to be nothing more nor less than a human being with sexual needs and desires.
I bring a gay man's perspective to this fight. I've been on the receiving end of attacks with the "family values" club for going on 20 years, and I find it delightful that a priggish sexual hypocrite like O'Donnell has been revealed to be someone, like the rest of us, who actually enjoys sex.
O'Donnell doesn't believe that I or my friends ought to be afforded the same understanding that you and the rest here (including Choire!) have shown for her.
Not to get too Constitutional on your ass, but the facts in Bowers v. Hardwick, the landmark Supreme Court case that enabled "anti-sodomy" laws and state-sponsored homophobia for a generation, were based on a Georgia police officer's report of what he found in a gay man's bedroom:
Until Lawrence v. Texas overturned that decision, we gays have had to live with precisely zero privacy rights. And O'Donnell is one of the new generation of homophobes. She wants to turn back the clock. To put it simply: she believes that queers are not entitled to sex. We can be "cured." And therefore we must be.
So keep that in mind when I view O'Donnell as a villain who has gotten frankly much less than she deserves.
As long as sex and sexuality are going to be political, and that's probably never going to change, then this wretched woman and her retrograde sex politics deserve to be scrutinized, even if that comes from the hand of Denton.
Oh, hey, no argument from me. Like my dad always says: If you're OK with trampling on other people's civil rights, don't be surprised if they're unsympathetic when the world hears about your lack of pube-grooming.
I think that historians looking back on 2010 will see the most important societal rift forming not around taxes/sex/unemployment/etc/etc/ but the philosophical implications of the \'it gets better\' advertising slogan.
I think they\'ll look back and wonder why progressives were so aggressively obsessed with opposing personalities who couldn\'t win/had no real power, instead of concentrating their energies on truly legislatively-dangerous people.
I think it's because most of what we like to think of as liberal/conservative political conflict is really just anxiety about cultural difference. How many critics of W. Bush never moved beyond "ugh!" and mocking his Texas ways?
Oh, I think it's just because, historically, drunken naked people have always been a lot more interesting to the American populace than even relatively uncomplicated political issues.
I think "they" will eventually realize that most people who think of themselves as progressives are really nothing of the kind: they've just found a clique they can fit into. And what better way to reinforce clique membership than by ganging up to mock an outsider? (Hmm: ganging up to mock outsiders — I wish someone would come up with campaign to make those outsiders feel better about themselves.)
First it was fashion, and being tidy, cute, and good listeners while being unavailable. Now it's that The Gays aren't even feminist allies! Maybe it's true what they say…
If only there was a word for the messy rift opening up between political ideology and feminist outrage here. Something that captures the gash that divides people, while simultaneously joining them in one unified body. There must be a word for something like that. Anyone?
This is the same Dan Savage who howled that Andrew Sullivan\\\'s precious privacy had been violated after the URL of Sully\\\'s barebacking profile was discovered? (The same Sully who had only the day before published an op-ed condemning Bill Clinton\'s reckless sexual behavior?)
Hypocrisy is a hell of a lot worse problem than occasional sleeping around.
PS: note to anyone who intends to edit a comment several times. Avoid the apostrophe, or else your finished comment will end up looking like something from Fark.
Of course, Andrew Sullivan wasn't, you know, running for office. Nor was he running around publicly advocating that no one have any sex other than the heterosexual married missionary reproductive type. So, yeah, his private sexual behavior really ought to have remained private, while there's still a good case that O'Donnell's is relevant. I'm not seeing the hypocrisy here.
Okay, this is a very old subject and I'm not going to harp on it. Sullivan had been hitting hard and repeatedly at Clinton specifically for irresponsible sexual behavior; in fact, if I recall correctly, his argument was that Clinton disqualified himself for office not because of perjury but rather because his continued irresponsibility demonstrated a lack of moral character: that is, someone who indulges in that much risky sex can't be trusted.
Sullivan's other idee fixe circa 2000: the "libidinal pathology" of gay sexual culture, which he called "a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation." (His words.)
Meanwhile, Sullivan was trolling online for bareback sex.
I can't imagine a more hypocritical attitude, except, just possibly, Savage's disingenuous claim that his fellow white, well-off, well-connected professional-gay media whore was in fact an utterly private citizen whose personal sexual morality had no conceivable relevance to the subject matter he preached about constantly (i.e., personal sexual morality).
I don't care for this Christine O'Donnell lady. But the story of the supposed escapade is actually the story of someone who was struggling to do the "right thing" (in her mind) – stay chaste – and succeeding!
Not to mention she's such a joke at this point, Gawker's post is masturbatory at best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q1lrykmf7k
No one who put the shot in high school would ever say they "threw the shot put."
(Yup! I put the shot in high school!)
From the post:
"The O'Donnell camp—with an assist from the National Organization of Women—issues a non-denial denial, condemns Gawker for running the story, and charges sexism."
1) She didn't condemn anything. She condoned.
2)The NOW statement which she adopted and endorsed called her "unfit for office."
3) Her own statement used the phrase "Coons goons" which is what I want HiredGoons to change his name to.
Re: 3) – That's racist, bro.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwKjW6G-UKE
Love that Raccoon!
Christine O'Donnell and slut-shaming: the new Jennifer Weiner and literary-critic sexism.
I'd take the idea of "slut-shaming" more serious in this case if there was an element of sexism here that doesn't more applicably sit smack in the middle of regular-everyday-political scandal stories.
If you Venn diagrammed the two, it would be a tiny circle completely inside a huge circle. So in this story we find all the ordinary prurience, all the latent American puritanism/hedonism split, all the messed up moralizing hypocrisy that makes up American political scandals is found here. There's very little new. But it seems to be emerging into people's minds as total sexism because it rings a hidden bell. I happen to think defenses of O'Donnell are a pretty interesting form of hidden gender issues in themselves – how an anti-feminist, anti-choice, anti-gay politician is being given a pass on this scandal precisely because of her gender. It's being made SPECIFICALLY sexist when it's actually fairly political and it's that specificity that makes this whole story seem unusual to me.
I mean, we have diagrams of stains on blue dresses, we struggle through every sartorial detail of Larry Craig's washroom sex statements (wide pants!). We know who slept with whom in the Spitzer affair, which people had their socks on. This very blog posted once about how Spitzer once slept with three hookers in one night (pruuuurient!!!).
I guess my point is this: there's no element or fact in this story that's any MORE demeaning than any other political scandal. If you replaced O'Donnell with a male figure, it would read in precisely the same way. That fact in itself makes me hesitant to see sexism.
When you're looking past the simplest answers, the reason might be that you just can't accept those as what YOU want. Maybe there's an agenda that your own mind is grinding away on?
Anyways. Lunchtime's over. See ya.
Yup, yup. Not quite sure why that's a response to my comment, but yup.
To me this seems pretty simple:
1) We have a candidate who claims her sexual conduct qualifies her for the office she's seeking.
2) It appears that said conduct doesn't square with reality.
3) It's fair to point this out, the same way it's fair to point out when a candidate claims their financial savvy qualifies them for the office they're seeking, when evidence suggests that they're not actually financially savvy.
4) The Gawker post is still a gross, inappropriate example of how to point it out.
5) Abe is right.
I was going to reply specifically to you, and then forgot about it, and then went back to the box to make a regular comment, and forgot it was still set to reply…
But on the plus side, I got to say \"went back to the box\" with a straight face.
The thing is, I didn't think that the Spitzer, Clinton, or Craig stories were particularly relevant either. I guess that at least with those three there were various degrees of actual illegal activity by actual elected officials. This, though, is a case of a lunatic Senate candidate who one time may have made out with a douchebag on Halloween.
These kinds of stories are a step toward limiting politics to only the people who have led the very most boring and calculated lives.
Our country run by people who exercise discipline and aren't exciting to read about?!? Lord, what would become of us?
Bait. ('bate?)
+1
Some of the liberal people on Twitter I follow were absolutely outraged by this Gawker story. I thought it was weird that politically liberal O\'Donnell despiers would jump to this priggish, anti-masturbation, gay-hating joke\'s defense, but then I remembered: It\'s is a lady thing.
I mean analytically, this is not that different than Larry Craig\'s bathroom escapades.
I plead guilty, counselor.
It's like when Jerry Brown called Meg Whitman a whore in a private conversation. Even though she is a "whore" in the same sense that Jerry is a "puppet" which she calls him publicly in her ads. Different words but the same meaning. I guess double standards cut both ways.
@lawyergay: Yeah, I'm gonna insist on defending people who I don't like when they're being treated in ways I think nobody should be treated. Sorry!
It turns out that some people, regardless of political bent, just really like to take every possible opportunity to get outraged about things.
@kitten: Not that it makes much difference if I'm right (and I'm just too lazy to actually look it up), but I think it was Brown's aide who made that comment. I'm only posting this so someone can tell me if I'm wrong (which is sort of like looking it up).
kneeto you are correct
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/10/brown_whitman_whore_audio.php
Like Larry Craig's bathroom escapades because she was soliciting sex from an undercover officer in a public place? Right, I got it.
No. O\'Donnell is like Craig because she has run her campaign in part on a retrograde sex- and sexuality-based platform. Just because she\'s a lady doesn\'t excuse her hypocrisy. This kind of response from righteously outraged O\'Donnell defenders seems a bit, um, sexist to me.
It turns out O\'Donnell likes rolling around naked with other people just like the rest of us!
You're confusing her hypocrisy with the way the way this disclosure was made, which is what people are pissed off about. You don't have to excuse her hypocrisy to find that this disclosure was a particularly low moment for our political discourse. The episode was revealed anonymously and in ways that were not designed simply to reveal her as a hypocrite but in ways designed to degrade her as a person.
O\'Donnell\'s entire political career is designed to degrade other people as people: Gays, women who get pregnant and have abortions, and people who masturbate or just enjoy sex. This pearl-clutching over the Gawker piece is misguided, although I do agree that it would have been far better if it hadn\'t been anonymous.
But as far as I\'m concerned, O\'Donnell has reaped what she\'s sown on this one. What\'s good for the goose…
Really, it's not like a notable chunk of our political discourse — and especially during campaign season — doesn't revolve around degrading people as people.
What's interesting, or telling, is: There is this huge group of people politically opposed to O'Donnell who have risen to her defense, more or less. Basically, they're saying, "She might be my enemy, but I don't think she should be treated this way." That's not a bad thing! Even if you think they're misguided, they're erring on the side of compassion.
Where it gets problematic is that when the situation is reversed, there doesn't seem to be much reciprocation. As some folks noted the other day, not a huge chorus of right-wingers condemning, you know, the head-stomping.
Fair enough. But then why should Larry Craig have been treated the way he was for simply looking for a good time in an airport bathroom? Why should John Ensign be treated the way he has for having an affair? Why should Eliot Spitzer have been treated the way he was for hiring a sex worker?
If you're a public political figure and your platform includes some or all of the following: "family values," or "anti-gay," or "pro-life," or "tough on crime," then your queerness, your adultery, your sexual behavior, or your law-breaking is news, plain and simple.
O'Donnell is one of these demented born-again virgin types who supports abstinence education, hates queers and wants the government to be able to force pregnant women to carry their pregnancies to term.
The fact that O'Donnell's been humiliated in the public sphere for her entirely human shaggy pussy and sexual desire is the least of what she deserves. But it's a good start.
Where was the outrage from you and the rest of the scolds when O'Donnell added "the sanctity of life" to her campaign platform? Where was the outrage when she discussed pornography and spoke of living a "righteous lifestyle"?
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/odonnells-greatest-hits.php
The inexplicable hand-wringing over this O'Donnell stuff is probably the best example of liberals "not being able to find their keys," to paraphrase Michael Moore.
@lawyergay: Are you talking to me?
Yeah…but also this thread. Reply away!
Oh, I'm not outraged over what has happened to Christine O'Donnell. I think the Gawker piece was an icky way of exposing her inconsistency, and therefore somewhat ineffective. (Not that this is surprising. Denton's primary interest is not the public good but garnering pageviews.) But I also think if you get into politics these days, hey, you run the risk of having icky stuff happen to you. Still, regardless of what I think, Honest Engine's assessment seems accurate to me: People aren't upset on O'Donnell's behalf because she got called out; they're upset because of the form the calling-out took.
Anyway, my point was just that the people you're upset with, the liberals defending O'Donnell — what they're doing is really sort of the opposite of what she has done. Whereas she says, essentially, that people need to conduct themselves a certain way, but that an exception should be made for her, they're saying no one deserves to have something like the Gawker post written about them, even a person they don't like.
So: The liberal outrage on behalf of O'Donnell actually stems from an attempt to hew to a moral code — a compassionate moral code — which is something, I think, to be proud of! The problem is, the folks on O'Donnell's side don't reciprocate. Their criteria for whether they'll defend someone has nothing to do with an objective moral code and everything to do with whether they like the person. And that seems to be working out pretty well for them, strategically speaking.
It's an interesting problem. Do those of us who believe in holding to a moral code abandon that belief in the hope that it will help us gain political power? If so, we probably just make the fighting worse, and even if we do gain power, by our own former standards we don't deserve it. On the other hand, it does suck to be the reasonable namby-pambies who keep trying to love our enemies and getting kicked in the head for it.
Thanks, Moff. I agree with a lot of what you say. Of course Denton's a sleazebag and the anonymous O'Donnell "story" was evidence of that. (It's now no longer "anonymous," as you probably know: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/10/is_this_the_guy.php.)
But it is relevant that a "chaste," supposedly 'family values'-embracing sexual moralizer has now been revealed to be nothing more nor less than a human being with sexual needs and desires.
I bring a gay man's perspective to this fight. I've been on the receiving end of attacks with the "family values" club for going on 20 years, and I find it delightful that a priggish sexual hypocrite like O'Donnell has been revealed to be someone, like the rest of us, who actually enjoys sex.
O'Donnell doesn't believe that I or my friends ought to be afforded the same understanding that you and the rest here (including Choire!) have shown for her.
Not to get too Constitutional on your ass, but the facts in Bowers v. Hardwick, the landmark Supreme Court case that enabled "anti-sodomy" laws and state-sponsored homophobia for a generation, were based on a Georgia police officer's report of what he found in a gay man's bedroom:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Hardwick
Until Lawrence v. Texas overturned that decision, we gays have had to live with precisely zero privacy rights. And O'Donnell is one of the new generation of homophobes. She wants to turn back the clock. To put it simply: she believes that queers are not entitled to sex. We can be "cured." And therefore we must be.
So keep that in mind when I view O'Donnell as a villain who has gotten frankly much less than she deserves.
As long as sex and sexuality are going to be political, and that's probably never going to change, then this wretched woman and her retrograde sex politics deserve to be scrutinized, even if that comes from the hand of Denton.
Oh, hey, no argument from me. Like my dad always says: If you're OK with trampling on other people's civil rights, don't be surprised if they're unsympathetic when the world hears about your lack of pube-grooming.
I thought this was a news site. The news would be if Dan Savage wasn't a kind of jackassy morally inconsistent prick.
News site? I thought it was for poking things with sticks.
@BadUncle: Poking things? Wait are we talking about TheAwl or Savage Love, here?
I think that historians looking back on 2010 will see the most important societal rift forming not around taxes/sex/unemployment/etc/etc/ but the philosophical implications of the \'it gets better\' advertising slogan.
I've always held the opinion that life is high school.
I think they\'ll look back and wonder why progressives were so aggressively obsessed with opposing personalities who couldn\'t win/had no real power, instead of concentrating their energies on truly legislatively-dangerous people.
I think it's because most of what we like to think of as liberal/conservative political conflict is really just anxiety about cultural difference. How many critics of W. Bush never moved beyond "ugh!" and mocking his Texas ways?
Oh, I think it's just because, historically, drunken naked people have always been a lot more interesting to the American populace than even relatively uncomplicated political issues.
I think "they" will eventually realize that most people who think of themselves as progressives are really nothing of the kind: they've just found a clique they can fit into. And what better way to reinforce clique membership than by ganging up to mock an outsider? (Hmm: ganging up to mock outsiders — I wish someone would come up with campaign to make those outsiders feel better about themselves.)
a study in the oh so many ways that philosophically shallow things can develop.
First it was fashion, and being tidy, cute, and good listeners while being unavailable. Now it's that The Gays aren't even feminist allies! Maybe it's true what they say…
Amen. Where\'s the Angle dirt?
WHY ARE YOU BULLYING DAN SAVAGE.
If only there was a word for the messy rift opening up between political ideology and feminist outrage here. Something that captures the gash that divides people, while simultaneously joining them in one unified body. There must be a word for something like that. Anyone?
The Great Poon Divide?
This is the same Dan Savage who howled that Andrew Sullivan\\\'s precious privacy had been violated after the URL of Sully\\\'s barebacking profile was discovered? (The same Sully who had only the day before published an op-ed condemning Bill Clinton\'s reckless sexual behavior?)
Hypocrisy is a hell of a lot worse problem than occasional sleeping around.
PS: note to anyone who intends to edit a comment several times. Avoid the apostrophe, or else your finished comment will end up looking like something from Fark.
Of course, Andrew Sullivan wasn't, you know, running for office. Nor was he running around publicly advocating that no one have any sex other than the heterosexual married missionary reproductive type. So, yeah, his private sexual behavior really ought to have remained private, while there's still a good case that O'Donnell's is relevant. I'm not seeing the hypocrisy here.
Okay, this is a very old subject and I'm not going to harp on it. Sullivan had been hitting hard and repeatedly at Clinton specifically for irresponsible sexual behavior; in fact, if I recall correctly, his argument was that Clinton disqualified himself for office not because of perjury but rather because his continued irresponsibility demonstrated a lack of moral character: that is, someone who indulges in that much risky sex can't be trusted.
Sullivan's other idee fixe circa 2000: the "libidinal pathology" of gay sexual culture, which he called "a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation." (His words.)
Meanwhile, Sullivan was trolling online for bareback sex.
I can't imagine a more hypocritical attitude, except, just possibly, Savage's disingenuous claim that his fellow white, well-off, well-connected professional-gay media whore was in fact an utterly private citizen whose personal sexual morality had no conceivable relevance to the subject matter he preached about constantly (i.e., personal sexual morality).
I don't care for this Christine O'Donnell lady. But the story of the supposed escapade is actually the story of someone who was struggling to do the "right thing" (in her mind) – stay chaste – and succeeding!
Not to mention she's such a joke at this point, Gawker's post is masturbatory at best.
http://gawker.com/5674353/i-had-a-one+night-stand-with-christine-odonnell
Is anybody else glad the elections will be over soon?