Last week, Politico’s Melanie Mason tackled the question of why female politicians are so rarely caught with their pants down. Mason starts out with a pretty good theory—”Men far outnumber women in elected office, and statistical probability dictates that if a random politician is caught in a sex scandal, it is overwhelmingly likely that the politician would be male”—and then offers up a bargain basement of half-baked ideas in order to cover all the basis—and sexist stereotypes against women. Most of these reasons would never, ever actually stop a woman from messing around, but that won’t stop us from buying into it all again.

Read More “Why Female Politicians Don’t Cheat. Hint: Too Busy Being Female Politicians” »

Mike Rogers, the gay activist blogger who worked to out Senator Larry Craig, Representative Mark Foley, and Representative Ed Schrock, has a new suspected closeted gay in the cross hairs: Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Rogers heads up “Proud of Who We Are,” a project aimed at “Holding Government Officials Accountable for Hiding Their Truth” (read: their gayness). McConnell is the Senate Minority Leader.

According to a press release issued today by Rogers’ org, the closet-opening crusader has had his sights set on McConnell for some time, and has “taken six trips to Kentucky in the last several months to investigate long-standing questions about McConnell’s military service.”

The press release says Proud of Who We Are “encourages closeted, anti-gay politicians to serve proudly as gay Americans, regardless of their political party.” Personally, I don’t agree with Rogers’ brand of forced outings; while I would pressure all politicians to support GLBT-positive legislation, I find implicating the politician’s own sexual orientation in that fight creepy and unnecessary. Every lawmaker on the national stage publicly supports some issue that they don’t themselves embody or believe; that’s politics, not news. But the drudging up of personal details of these politicians is somewhat justified by the “anti-gay” part of the equation; conventional political wisdom states that a politician’s sex life should be off-limits unless it implicates him in unlawful activity, or worse, hypocrisy. With McConnell, Rogers has got the anti-gay part down: The release notes that “The Human Rights Campaign has given McConnell a zero rating for his anti-gay rights voting agenda in the Senate.”

What Rogers doesn’t exactly have is the “gay” part. He alleges that McConnell enlisted in the army during the Vietnam war but was “abruptly discharged four months later for a minor medical condition.” McConnell’s excuse, that “he needed to be released quickly to attend New York University,” doesn’t pan out, Rogers claims: “NYU records indicate that McConnell never applied to the school, and at the time of his discharge he had already earned a law degree from the University of Kentucky.”

Maybe Rogers is just waiting to drop the big gay bombshell, but at this point I’m not convinced that elaborate draft-dodging proves that someone is a homosexual. You’ve got the anti-gay, Rogers. Now: Where’s the gay?