the outing of an active practitioner

it's not every day the american family association can make me laugh out loud.

it's every other day. and today was one of those other days. in a onenewsnow opinion piece, guest columnist matt barber argues the judge in the prop 8 trial needs to recuse himself because, well... here's barber's first sentence:

Last weekend the San Francisco Chronicle "outed" Proposition 8 Judge Vaughn Walker as an active practitioner of the homosexual lifestyle.

an active practitioner! ru-roh! it sounds almost... clinical, don't you think?

barber is making some major assumptions by suggesting 65-year-old judge vaughn walker is an active practitioner. are we sure the good judge is actually gettin' any nowadays? do we have eye-witness accounts? shouldn't we at least ask before jumping to conclusions like that?

what if he's a non-active practitioner? does that change things? what if he doesn't need practice? at 65 i bet judge walker knows pretty well what he's doing, which tab goes into which slot.

there's another problem in that first sentence: judge walker has been an open gay man for some time, so the chronicle article didn't "out" him (in quotes - "out"..."out") it just made his sexual orientation more public. truth be told, judge walker is probably just the kind of homosexual barber and the afa would normally, er, tolerate: one who, as the chronicle so blithely puts it, "has never taken pains to disguise - or advertise - his orientation." (advertise like some people do – blogging about it all the time.) in fact walker, appointed by president george h.w. bush in 1989, has in the past shown a fairly conservative bent.

while we're on the subject, wouldn't walker also have to recuse himself if he were an active practitioner of the heterosexual lifestyle? will the heterosexual members of the supreme court have to recuse themselves when the case comes before them? (no worries, judge thomas – one drunken night at holy cross college all those years ago does not count!)