It is unsurprising to anyone who has paid attention to political gossip that this appears to be Lindsey Graham. Terms like “open secret” get bandied about when talking about his rumored homosexuality. But is it right to out him? Here’s one perspective.
To me the question isn’t “what is the morality of outing Linzeeeee,” it’s “how can we use this information to get him out of office.” I don’t give a flying fuck who he fucks or pays to fuck. I care a ton about the prospect of flipping a senate seat.
What if the gay community seems divided on what to do and it’s not clear to you how the majority feels? How would your decision making process work if you had a job where it mattered, like a newspaper editor deciding what gets published?
This is a bit of a cop-out imo. Outing of this kind doesn’t become morally acceptable just because it’s done by “the gay community”, even if such a body of uniform opinion actually exists.
I’m generally strongly against outing but there are two exceptions both of which might apply here:
If he has a history of supporting oppressive anti-gay legislation. Not just talking about not supporting gay marriage, worse stuff than that. I cbf checking to see if that sort of thing is in Graham’s history or not.
If, as has been frequently speculated, this information is already being used to blackmail him. That’s just not a tenable state of affairs and there’s then no option but to fight fire with fire.
A little bit I suppose. But at the same time, if the gay community feels very strongly in one direction with regard to weaponizing this bit of information, who am I to disagree with their opinions?
If it’s something like, what should the education around homosexuality be in schools, then I would agree that the gay community has special standing to comment. I don’t agree with the idea that gay people have any special standing to decide whether it’s OK to out details of someone’s sex life, just because part of the details in this case happen to be that he’s gay. Maybe gay people have more of an understanding of exactly what the pain of being outed is like, but we all understand that the idea here is to do damage to Graham by exposing his private life. The details of whether that’s a 5/10 or a 9/10 on the shame meter or whatever doesn’t really matter to me, the principle is the same in either case. Understanding what it’s like to be gay doesn’t seem relevant to the equation here to me.
From what I’ve read/heard, his homosexuality has been known for many years, and his total debasement to Trump–immediately after they golfed together–is because of something else. Could be that he likes young boys or something like that, but it’s not grown men that he’s being blackmailed over.
Right, but it was also a common position like a decade ago or whatever, held by people like Obama. Outing either an orientation or the details of someone’s private sex life is a very serious thing to do in my opinion and a standard that would allow you to do it to like half the country is too low a bar to set. I don’t think it’s OK to do it to people who are a bit clueless about the consequences of policies and resistant to social change or whatever, the standard should be wilful and deliberate cruelty towards gay people imo (or like cruelty towards sex workers if you’re outing someone as a john, or whatever). I’m guessing you would be on board with the idea that outing people shouldn’t become a commonplace political weapon that you use at the drop of a hat, you kind of have to stand on principle or it becomes a weapon which will be used against the vulnerable.
Edit: I guess the more succinct way of putting it is that my default position is “no outing people’s orientations or sex lives, ever” and I’m stretching to make an exception for really despicable people who go out of their way to hurt others.
microbet is concerned with the collateral damage to gay people who are not Lindsey Graham. Another way to put it is that you’re doing damage to not just Lindsey Graham.