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I'm very troubled by the idea some people here seem to have, that they are the ones who get to decide what kinds of facts about other people get made public. Everyone has their own zone of privacy they want to maintain, and it can be about a number of subjects, sexual or otherwise. As I posted before, those sorts of decisions are very intimate, and very personal to each individual. For others to decide for reasons of their own to invade that is highly offensive to our common humanity.
The hypocrisy argument doesn't fly. If someone is running for office on some sort of platform that is less pro-gay than someone here would like, the question to ask is whether, if elected, s/he would promote the policies s/he advocates in the campaign. If s/he does, then s/he has been totally honest and has delivered precisely what s/he said s/he would - that's honesty. What's more, if that person secretly is engaged in some form of gay sex, then what that person is doing is advocating restrictions on him/herself - in other words, that person is arguably in the best position to make judgments on these things because any laws s/he may enact will affect him/her directly. If we want lawmakers to have a sense of responsibility about what they're doing, how can this possibly be bad?
In the final analysis, the outers have made a judgment that their own views of the world and of how things should be done are so important and so superior to everyone else's that they have the right to determine how other people present themselves to the world, and to interfere with other people's personal decisionmaking. To begin with, that is egotistical and arrogant in the extreme - no one appointed the outer to be anyone else's guardian. For another thing, by taking for yourself the license to do that, you have empowered those who disagree with YOU the right to do the same thing to you, and publish YOUR secrets and things you'd rather other people not know. (I know you think you're immune because you're not running for office - but you've opened your mouth and publicly fingered other people, right? so that makes you fair game - those who can't stand the heat should stay out of the kitchen). And finally, you simply don't know for certain how someone else lives or how certain aspects of their personality fit into their lives, or what decisions they may have made or when they made them. Deciding to "out" someone inherently assumes a whole lot about the person being outed that may or may not be true. And that's especially regrettable in those cases where the person being "outed" has a wife and kids, who are going to suffer from the outing - these are totally innocent people who are going to have some serious difficulties for no reason other than some person has a political agenda.
Sorry, I believe in respecting other people. I respect them if they're gay, I respect them if they're not, and I respect their choices about what to tell other people about their private lives. I'm not so arrogant as to think that my own views are automatically binding on other people.
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