Supreme Disclosure
William Saletan argues that we shouldn’t ask Elena Kagan is she’s gay, and she needn’t volunteer an answer. Forced disclosure isn’t just a threat to the nomination, he writes, it’s a threat to freedom.
William Saletan argues that we shouldn’t ask Elena Kagan is she’s gay, and she needn’t volunteer an answer. “The political threat is that unconventional sexuality or religion can destroy the nominee,” he writes. “But the moral threat is far greater. In the act of forced disclosure, ‘one’s ability to describe oneself, one’s freedom to say who one is, is peremptorily taken away,’ a great essayist once wrote. At stake is the most fundamental of human rights: ‘the ability to choose who one is and how one is presented, to control the moment of self-disclosure and its content.'”
