Follow-up on Outing Gay Conservatives

Julian Sanchez has a post about the recent outing of Congressman David Dreier, and he approaches it from a more practical perspective. While saying that he doesn't really have a moral problem with it, he offers this analysis:

But I'm increasingly thinking it's a counterproductive strategy. First, Dreier has at least recently been one of a number of Republicans who've pushed back against a Federal Marriage Amendment; now seems and odd time to blindside him with this. But more generally, it's unclear what this is supposed to accomplish. Assume elected gay officials are not, by and large, self-hating. If they go along with homophobic legislation, presumably it's because they'd often like to oppose it, but think their constituencies wouldn't go along. Moreover, the most homophobic districts are likely to be even more averse to electing a gay representative than they would be to electing a presumptively straight one who was lukewarm about anti-gay legislation. So what do outings ultimately accomplish? When they have any impact, it's likely to be to replace gay officials who might at least want to try to slowly turn their party around on such issues with authentic homophobes. How does this really advance the cause of gay rights?

Certainly a reasonable question, and one that the gay community is decidedly split on as well. The Log Cabin Republicans oppose public outings, as does the Human Rights Campaign, and probably for a mixture of moral and practical reasons. A commenter named Thoreau sums up the dissonance at the center of the issue for those of us who are sympathetic to gay rights:

On the one hand, I love seeing hypocrisy exposed. Nothing beats the sweet satisfaction of watching a hypocrite get caught and wriggle on the hook as he's reeled in.

On the other hand, as somebody who firmly believes that it's none of my fucking business what consenting adults do behind closed doors, I also recoil from seeing somebody's sexual life dragged before the public. Even if he is a hypocrite, even if he did lie, even if he did cheat, even if it was with an intern, and even if the lover is the state director of homeland security, I still recoil from it.

I guess that outing a homophobic politician is kind of like horror movies. I don't want to see it, but at the same time I can't look away.

Sounds about right to me. Strictly as a practical matter, what will the effect of these outings be? Most gay politicians who take anti-gay political positions do so, one assumes, because their constituents are anti-gay. Which means that even if those who are doing the outing are motivated by hatred of hypocrisy, the backlash by the public against the person they're outing will be motivated mostly by hatred of gays. Do gay rights advocates really want to feed their fellow homosexuals to the wolves in this way? Or will it, as another commenter on Julian's article suggested, desensitize the public to revelations of homosexuality and therefore make it less of an issue in the future? I'm still torn on this issue.