The guy on the right feels happy and safe with everyone knowing he’s gay, so the guy on the left is a fool for being angry at a sleazy website for telling the world that HE’S gay. Wait..WHAT?

Every now and then, the Washington Post publishes an opinion piece from a guest commentator that crosses the line  distinguishing eccentric from irresponsible. Today’s essay by David Lat, the founder and CEO of the legal industry gossip site Above the Law, is an example of this bad habit. How wrong do one’s logic, values and message have to be before the Post deems them unworthy of promotion and wide consumption? Apparently, there is no limit.

Lat’s essay flagged its obtuseness immediately in its title: “Being Gay Isn’t Shameful, Do Why Does Outing Matter?” (The online version is “Peter Thiel had no reason to be angry at Gawker for writing that he’s gay.“)

The impetus for the article—it is so ethically deranged that I almost think it has to be a joke: who thinks like this?—is the news this week that  wrestler Hulk Hogan’s devastating and perhaps fatal lawsuit against Gawker Media was bankrolled by Peter Thiel,  the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and an  early Facebook investor.  Gawker outed him in a 2007 story, and Theil is using Hogan’ suit over Gawker revealing a sex tape to try to put the ethics-free celebrity-abusing site out of business. Thiel is just being petty and unreasonable, says Lat. Lat is gay and proud of it, so  Thiel should be too!

Writes Lat—whose own gossip site is not above revealing embarrassing facts about well-known figures for its readers’ titillation:

“The idea that Thiel is getting revenge for having been wronged, that Gawker’s original reporting on him was just another example of the same bottom-feeding impulses that drove the Hogan post, might sound reasonable at first. But objecting to a report that a man’s friends and colleagues all knew was gay sends a pernicious message that has nothing to do with tabloid journalism, the power of billionaires or free speech. There’s nothing shameful about being gay…”

***

“Various state laws protect against invasions of privacy, but they typically create liability for disclosing otherwise private facts about someone that are “offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities.” Simply being attracted to people of the same sex doesn’t meet that test anymore…”

***

“In other professions and in other parts of the world, being openly gay can carry harsh consequences — ostracism, physical harm, even death. So I understand the danger and wrongness of outing someone who lives in such a society, where outing can lead to violence. But Thiel and I (fortunately) don’t live in such a society — and it’s nonsensical to act as though we do. Yet many observers seem to take a dogmatic “one size fits all” approach to whether it’s ever okay to report that someone is gay…”

***

“I’m hopeful that we will soon live in a world where being openly gay is a right that anyone can enjoy. And we’ll reach that world a whole lot faster if we just stop with all the hand-wringing over the outing of billionaires and celebrities such as Thiel.”

***

“We need less sanctimony about privacy and more gay role models to go public. And when they do, we should greet their coming out with support and encouragement — or maybe, better yet, a shrug and a yawn.”

How to begin dismantling an assertion that is wrong in every way?

Lat begins by arguing that most of his associates knew Theil was gay, so it was silly for him to mind being outed to the world at large. This is a bright-line example of one of the Golden Rule distortions on the Rationalization List: “Do unto others as others who think like you do would also do to those others.” Lat manages to miss the obvious ethical objection to this verdict: it doesn’t matter whether Lat would mind being outed in this circumstance. What matters is that Theil, for his own reasons, didn’t want to be outed, and had every right in the world to have his autonomy and his desire for privacy respected, as do we all.

Lat believes that because someone choosing not to have their sex-life broadcast to the world as sleazy website click-bait might be interpreted as expressing shame for being gay, they shouldn’t object at all. What? Nothing about Theils’ response stops Lat from going to the highest mountaintop and proclaiming his pride and joy that he is a homosexual, nor does it undermine that  proclamation. Announcing that one doesn’t want to be outed and resents the intrusion doesn’t necessarily suggest shame. It  states an individual’s rational and justified objection to anyone presuming to reveal aspects of that individual’s life, without his consent, that the individual should be able to reveal, or not, to whoever he wants to reveal it to, because it’s his life. That’s all.

Lat apparently feels that all other gays have an ethical obligation to act in a way that makes it easier for him to convince others that he a happy, confident gay man. How presumptuous. Theil and any other gay man have a right to feel any way they want to, including ashamed, and act accordingly. Shameful is a something someone is ashamed of, whether someone else is ashamed of the same thing or not. I’m bald. I see lots of men wearing hairpieces because they are embarrassed about being bald. I think they are silly, but it’s their heads, not mine, and their lives. If they want to hide their head in shame–literally—that’s their choice to make.  I would never write that their shame, that I don’t feel, makes it harder for me to emulate Lex Luthor, Kojak, and Yul Brenner. If someone snatched the hairpiece off of a famous bald man’s head in public, I wouldn’t mock him for being upset, saying, as Lat does, “You have nothing to be upset about!”

Gawker revealed private information that Theil didn’t want revealed. Ethics FOUL. It’s as simple as that.

Then, being a lawyer and, like many lawyers, crippled in the consideration of ethics, Lat uses a legal standard to claim conduct isn’t wrong. Did Theil sue Gawker? No, he didn’t, because he had no legal case. What Gawker did was still unethical—wrong. 

Lat makes the jaw-dropping argument that because he (thinks he) lives and works in an industry where being gay is accepted, Theil must agree that he lives in a society where there are no negative consequences of being gay. First of all, Lat is spectacularly naive, or, perhaps more likely, embracing the currently epidemic delusion among progressives that saying something is true makes it true. Ask the hundreds of closeted gay Hollywood stars, who also work in an “accepting” culture, how comfortable they would feel about having Gawker reveal  their sexuality to the world. Tell them that they are being “nonsensical” to think that the role as the tough-talking lady’s man action hero in the big budget blockbuster being cast isn’t more likely to go to the ripped actor who has not been outed.. (Republicans are afraid to reveal themselves in Hollywood.)

Moreover, what makes Lat think that human beings only exist in one culture at a time? Theil has to do business overseas, where he is trying to make deals with people who live in some of those places where “being openly gay can carry harsh consequences.”  Theil may also have close friends, family and church members who are not as enlightened as Lat’s colleagues. He may have one, beloved, doting, aged Bible-thumping aunt that he would rather not see have a coronary over the news that her nephew is a sinner. Never mind: Lat’s theory is that how he feels as an openly gay man is the only legitimate way to feel. Let’s out everybody! Nobody cares!

No, nobody should care, but that’s not reality. Lat is  denying reality in order to try to mold it to his liking, and willing to jettison privacy as a right and an ethical value as part of the deal. You don’t get more ruthless, arrogant and self-obsessed than that. Because Thiel happily accepting a website invading  his privacy will make things easier for Lat to bask in gayness, Lat labels Theil is a fool for resenting the invasion.

Yechhh.

I don’t know what bizarre combination of indoctrination and ideological mania can lead someone not only to hold such an unethical view but to argue it in a public forum so smugly, but I do know this: if you are a prominent gay or bi-sexual lawyer who hasn’t yet taken out a full page ad in the Times announcing that fact, I’d watch “Above the Law” carefully. Its founder thinks that outing you is no big deal, and your belief that this should be your decision and nobody else’s is “nonsense.”

______________________