New restrictions on immigration would bar foreign visitors who don’t share “Russian values.” I hope he doesn’t give Karl Rove any ideas. Russia will also bar people with HIV from entering the country. Why is it that the first instinct of a country with a domestic HIV explosion is to ban foreigners with it?
“SANTORUM” WON: But the press would never pick it as the newly coined word of the year. So it got consigned to second place. Slate explains it all.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? Many of you have emailed me to ask why it matters one drop what Lincoln’s sexual orientation was. Well, the relationship between his conflicted sexual orientation and his political life hasn’t been fully or even partly explored and Tripp ventures nothing but a few musings. Future scholars may now try. I certainly don’t believe that someone’s being gay makes them somehow a better person. Jeffrey Dahmer and Ernst Roehm were gay, along with Proust, Auden, Michelangelo and Whitman. But I do think that any historian trying to understand Lincoln should be interested in his emotional life and development. To me, it merely reveals more layers of Lincoln’s greatness. Here’s what I wrote to a friend yesterday:
Understanding Lincoln’s personality – his deep depressions, his terrible marriage, his strange and distant religious faith, his empathy for outsiders – all make more sense when you consider the kind of toll his sexual orientation must have taken. Imagine a Jew forced to conceal his identity all his life for political reasons. Do you really think this is irrelevant to understanding someone’s life? I don’t think many straights understand the enormous psychological damage homophobia does to people who lived in societies where they could never express love or have meaningful relationships. It’s crippling at the deepest level of the human soul and heart. Lincoln triumphed over this to do truly great things, although he also succumbed at times to profound despair. He overcame the prejudice of his time and managed to find love and solace in a few moments of intimacy. He did so without ever lying or even concealing his loves. Why denigrate or minimize that personal triumph? Especially when so many of Lincoln’s Republican successors are intent on reimposing the agony and misery of the closet today?
That’s why it matters. We owe the past our respect. And we owe Lincoln of all people a modicum of honesty.
The Dish 