On Monday, President Obama announced current US solicitor general Elena Kagan as his pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (here), setting off the usual storm of partisan commentary that rages whenever Obama does anything more substantive than play a game of basketball. And as the media debates whether Kagan is an activist elitist liberal academic radical or a cautious centrist pragmatist, secondary prurient speculation seethes about Kagan’s sexuality — perhaps as a proxy wrangle for Kagan’s rather obscure judicial opinions. Kagan may have a thin paper trail, but she’s 50, unmarried, opposed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as “a moral injustice in the first order” (here), and damningly has played softball as an adult (“I fully expect the White House to push back and claim Kagan never played softball and that it’s a smear to insinuate she did,” said Chris Barron, founder of the conservative gay group GOProud, here). And of course, there’s Kagan’s hair, which in some pictures appears to be the practical career-woman crop and in other pictures looks like an earnest dyke haircut.
But the impact of Kagan’s sexuality on her performance as a Supreme Court Justice is neither here nor there; since the media is grasping at straws to prove sapphic tendencies, it’s obvious that Kagan has kept her private life — whether homo-, hetero-, or asexual — firmly private. Clarence Thomas had a proclivity for inter-office improprieties, yet he’s ruled consistently like the conservative nut we knew he’d be back when he was nominated.
Meanwhile, as bloggers painstakingly analyze Kagan’s fashion choices for clues (pearl necklaces=straight, bulky blazers=gay), another member of the Obama Administration totally outed himself in today’s New York Times… in the Dining Section. Yes, White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses is gay (here): “A gay chef is no longer news, but it is still rare for those who work in the White House to speak publicly about being gay.”
The fact that there’s a gay man working in the White House kitchen is a potential powder keg of controversy for Obama. Nevermind that Yosses was appointed pastry chef by Laura Bush in 2007, it is Michelle Obama who continues to knowingly allow a homosexual to be in charge of the White House desserts. Not only is the stomach a direct route to a man’s heart, it’s also a pathway into his brain. What better way for the gays to infilitrate and influence the policies of this government than through puff pastry and tiramisu? No wonder Obama’s appointing a lesbian to the Supreme Court… he’s been eating gay cheesecake.
