May 16, 2003  |  By: LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN  | COMMENTS     

to be honest with the electorate.”

As Norman notes in his column, he is not the first journalist to broach the subject of Foley’s sexual orientation, although he is the first to state as fact that Foley is gay.

National gay magazines Advocate and Out, both broached the subject in 1996, when Foley voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of gay marriages.

“Frankly, I don’t think what kind of personal relationships I have in my private life is of any relevance to anyone else,” Foley said in a written statement to the Advocate at the time.

Whether “outing” a public official is ever appropriate was hotly debated then, and remains strongly contested today.

“People who choose to lead a public life know that their lives are open for discussion to the media, and whenever it is relevant to a larger story, their sexual orientation, just like their tax returns or anything else, should be discussed,” said Michelangelo Signorile, a gay writer and activist who penned the 1996 Out article.

In the past, outing has usually been reserved for politicians who are secretly gay but oppose gay rights. With the exception of DOMA, however, Foley has supported legislation backed by gays, including co-sponsoring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill to ban anti-gay job bias.

“As a conservative, Congressman Foley has been a longtime advocate for getting government out of people’s lives,” Fordham said. “He has been consistent in his view that government should not interfere with private enterprise or private lives.”

But voters deserve to know if there is another motivation behind Foley’s votes, Norman said, especially because they represent a “hard left turn” from his other Republican positions.

“It is something voters should know about,” he said. “Mark Foley doesn’t answer honestly — I won’t say he lies, but he hides from the truth … Might not this be actually, for lack of a better word, for a selfish motive?”

Both supporters and opponents of outing framed their arguments in terms of privacy, citing the pending Supreme Court challenge to the Texas law banning gay sodomy. Two gay men, arrested in a private bedroom, brought the case, arguing that the law violates their rights to privacy and equal protection.

Norman said recent attention to the case — and the now infamous remarks by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) supporting the law and comparing homosexuality to incest and bestiality — helped prompt him to pen his story outing Foley.

“People in his party want to criminalize, or keep criminalizing, one of the most basic human expressions,” he said.

Fordham, however, called it “unfortunate” that “some in the gay community who, on the one hand, are outraged when law enforcement officials in Texas violate the rights of two men in their homes then feel the need to pry into the personal lives of their elected officials.

“I see a pretty glaring inconsistency in the view of the gay community in how they treat their elected officials,” Fordham said. In addition to the Victory Fund, officials with the Human Rights Campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans — two national gay rights groups that have backed Foley — said they oppose outing people against their will.

Young, from the Victory Fund, also cited the Texas case in e