“Outing” someone’s sexuality is a violation of privacy, it’s rude and it can even be dangerous. LGBTQ groups have argued this for years — but apparently the rules don’t apply if you’re The New York Times.
The Times ran a story over the weekend that had only one point: Ed Koch was gay.
There was no reason to report this. Koch died in 2013. Even if he had “regrets,” as sources claim, he had 88 years to discuss his private life and decided against it. The sources claim to be his friends. We should hope for better friends.
The thinnest justification for not respecting Koch’s choices is that the radical LGBT Democratic Club is pressuring Democrats to remove his name from the Queensboro Bridge, because they claim he mishandled the AIDS crisis. Or, as the club’s questionnaire states slanderously, “In view of the fact that Ed Koch has been documented to have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS, and was blatantly racist . . .”
It’s revisionist history to claim that the national government, much less the mayor of New York, should have known how to handle the epidemic perfectly from the start, particularly when there were no effective medical treatments. And gay activists denounced some of the preventative moves made, such as the closing of bathhouses, as discriminatory.
“It is impossible to know just how Mr. Koch’s personal identity might have colored the city’s approach to the disease,” the Times writes, an insulting suggestion.
So why no pushback on the Times exposé? Because it’s all part of the Left’s obsession with identity politics, and a woke rewriting of history.
Whatever homophobia Ed Koch faced, whatever privacy he craved, it does not matter. By the standards of today, it is a crime that he was not out, proud and making gay rights his biggest cause. Whatever other accomplishments he had as mayor are superseded by his sexuality.
You must fit into the box that has been assigned to you — one as confining as any closet.