(Originally posted on 8/12/11 – I lost the original post in a server move and, consequently, any comments that went with it.)
Alex Campbell, writing for the Indianapolis Star, reports that Rep. Phil Hinkle picked up an eighteen year old man on Craigslist.
You can go to the article itself for the details and decide for yourself, but it certainly appears to be a male prostitution situation. Hinkle himself suggests that it was a shakedown but, when pressed, did not elaborate.
Again, for me, I’m not terribly interested in what people do behind closed doors. To the extent this constitutes infidelity, this is between himself and his wife. If he wasn’t a proponent for enshrining a marriage discrimination amendment in the Indiana Constitution, I probably would not even bother commenting on this. But, he is, and so, I am.
When these situations have cropped up in the past, I think one of the standard apologies is to excuse apparent hypocrisy with arguments about aspirational morality. “I am fallen and fallible, but that is no reason not to legislate to require the morality to which I aspire.” Or something like that.
But what I think we need to get out of our collective heads is the notion that being gay is immoral. Cheating on your wife is immoral (but not, so far as I know, illegal) because it’s a betrayal of trust. I’m open to the idea, but not necessarily convinced, that paying for sex is immoral. But I don’t see the immorality of being gay. Some would point out that the Bible disapproves of it; but that’s not so much an argument as an appeal to authority. So far as I can tell, the negative affects surrounding being gay pretty much all flow from social opprobrium, not from the fact of being gay itself. By voting to ban marriage equality, Rep. Hinkle has contributed to that opprobrium; apparently to his own detriment. And, political petard hoisting is pretty generally news worthy.
Doesn’t this make him one of those job creators we always hear about?
Hinkle’s judgement was bad, and there’s no getting around his personal responsibilty for it. I understand that although he voted for HJR-6, the so-called “Indiana Marriage Protection Amendment”, he isn’t the kind of self-righteous “family values” type that seems to have hijacked his party. In a sense, he’s just one more victim of it. When will people wake up and realize that the anti-gay drumbeat causes people to hide themselves, often marrying when they shouldn’t have, with very painful results for spouses and children when events thrust them out of the closet?