Threatened "outing" of Senator protected by 1st Am? Or unprotecte d extortion?

[Howard Schweber]

I hate it when I agree with Mark.  Seriously, it makes my feet itch and I 
break out in hives.  (If I cannot depend on designated others to be always 
and perfectly wrong, how can I maintain my certainty in my own perfect 
correctness?)

And yet . . .

I say it's blackmail -- a threat to reveal damaging personal information 
unless the victim acts or refrains from acting in accordance with the 
instructions of the party making the threat.  I haven't checked any 
criminal statutes, but I am willing to bet that in at least some 
jurisdictions the laws are sufficiently broadly worded that this action 
could be prosecuted as a crime.

I think that outing is a cruel practice under any circumstances.  That does 
not mean that it is never justified.  Where an elected official seeks 
office by presenting him or herself as a paragon of personal moral virtue, 
and makes homosexuality in others a sign of a lack of such virtue, then the 
cruelty may be justified as a classic application of Thomistic just war 
principles.  (Did I just cite a Christian saint?!  What is happening to me 
today???)

But threatening such a revelation in order to compel an action is 
blackmail, and when the action in question is a vote cast by a 
representative it is doubly repulsive, as a matter of democratic as well as 
personal principle.

Howard Schweber
Dept. of Political Science
UW-Madison 
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