Get Outed, Get Out

My friend is a conservative lawyer in Virginia Beach--we met at the Young Republicans meeting I wrote about last week. This guy is a fountain of scuttlebutt and damning gossip about cops, criminals and lawmakers in this ever-so-conservative military town.

He told me two weeks ago that the latest buzz was that Representative Ed Schrock had been taped requesting a sexual encounter with a young man via telephone from a gay escort service. As a straight guy, I'm not sure of the rules here, but I think that makes one even gayer.

Now, two weeks later, the guy is resigning over these allegations, which supposedly cropped up on the website/blog run by a gay man who has a history of outing closeted opponents to gay rights.

But think about it: just because someone posts something on a blog doesn't make it true. Are these allegations truer because I just reposted them? Were they less true before I heard them, almost truer when I decided not to blog about them, then truer now?

But what adds validity to the story is this: the fact that this guy decided to resign rather than fight for himself. It takes about ten minutes to set up a weblog, another ten to post to it. Any idiot can do it. But caving in this quickly makes you wonder, doesn't it?

One final questions: since when does being gay make one unfit to govern? Or being in the closet? Barney Frank is openly gay, he's doing fine. Bill Clinton and almost every politician ever has had heaps of affairs and nobody's sweating it too hard. So why is it this big problem if a government official has a gay affair?

If people act like something is wrong, it's going to stay wrong, and I am not lying.

posted by Jeff Simmermon @ 1:25 PM