N.B.: For some reason, after dropping my link to Greenwald, he continues to pop up on my reading radar more often.
Greenwald's confusion on the topic is familiar. I used to feel the same way until I read that sexual minorities differ from straight people in that their sole orientation is sexual. Apparently, it is impossible for gay folk to have friendly relations with straight people because, like Harry Burns in When Harry Met Sally says of unattractive women, "You pretty much want to nail them, too." Among the weird quirks of homophobes is the confusion over the term "sexual" in "homosexual" and "sexual orientation". Rather than "gender", for some reason I cannot fathom, they insist it refers to sexual acts. Thus, a gay man is gay not because he is romantically attracted to other men, but because he desires nothing but sex with men. In this understanding, sexual minorities are not just emotionally stunted, perpetual adolescents whose minds never leave their crotches, but are a direct threat to straight people because they cannot relate to them outside of a desire for sex.
Thus, asking a public figure his or her sexual orientation, quite apart from whether or not it is value neutral or not (and I happen to agree with Glenn that, on the merits, the Obama Administration flubbed this one; they should have told people to mind their own business), is precisely, asking what positions a person prefers, whether or not they have ever been in a threesome, etc. Indeed, for some people, obsessed with the issue of sexual orientation, the revelation this or that person is gay or lesbian reveals much about their sex lives precisely because these people are convinced that is the only thing sexual minorities are interested in.
Like tabloid reporters who focus on the private lives of public figures to the exclusion of any merits their professional lives may have, homophobes who think this way sincerely (and mistakenly) believe that coming out invites all sorts of speculation concerning private sexual practices that become not just fodder for odd fantasies, but relevant to their public lives because these folks really do not believe that sexual minorities have anything other than sex on their minds.
I realize this is an odd position, and I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how this makes anything like a connection with the real world. It is, sadly, true. Thus, questions regarding Solicitor General Kagan's sexual orientation, while certainly, in an ideal world, outside the bounds of propriety, is directly relevant precisely because there are people who believe that if she is, indeed a lesbian (a subject about which I neither know nor care in the slightest), she cannot,ipso facto, be an effective Supreme Court Justice. Her mind will wander between the thighs of female advocates before the court, she will lust after Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, and hate the six male justices.
