Yes, but the left's hatred of queers is included in "everyone".

James Taranto, still hungover from his European Vacation, lags behind Your Humble Servant.

'D' Is for Bigotry

Last week we noted that posters on the Angry Left Daily Kos Web site were specuating that John Roberts's 4-year-old son was gay. It turns out other Kos posters are speculating that Roberts himself is gay. Here's the "argument" someone called "ceolaf" makes:

He didn't get married until he was 40. That's really late. Now, he's a devout Catholic, so you know he didn't have sex before he got married (at least not heterosexual sex).

He married a (female) partner at a major law firm. My wife is on the cusp of partnerhood and I never see her. I don't think that my parents had sex after my dad made partner (don't try to tell me otherwise). You think that they have sex?

He has kids, therefore he must have had sex with a woman? Nope. They're adopted.

Possibly most damning: He played Peppermint Patty in his school play. That's totally gay. And cross-dressing.

This may be meant in a jocose spirit, and in any case Roberts obviously isn't gay. But it got us to thinking: Liberals and Democrats certainly aren't above gay-baiting. Last year Kedwards crudely attempted to appeal to antigay sentiment by proclaiming that Vice President Cheney has a gay daughter. And as The Weekly Standard's David Skinner notes, innuendoes about David Souter's sexuality flew in 1990, when then-President Bush appointed him to the Supreme Court:

"This is a man who has never been married, never had children," noted one widely quoted observer, a prominent lawyer who, reported R.W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times, "asked not to be identified because he practices from time to time before the Court." . . . This statement was quoted and alluded to so often that Souter soon became pegged as the Curious Bachelor from New England.

NPR's Nina Totenberg, Skinner notes, called Souter "at best, very weird."

The liberal-left engages in other forms of bigotry as well. A Senate Democratic memo revealed that Judiciary Committee Democrats targeted Miguel Estrada's judicial nomination for defeat because "he is Latino." And although Clarence Thomas's opponents avoided directly making an issue of his race during his confirmation hearings, these days he is the frequent target of liberal racism, ranging from relatively subtle (Sen. Harry Reid stereotyping him as unintelligent) to shockingly crude (Emerge magazine caricaturing him as a lawn jockey). And of course as we noted last week, Anita Hill faulted Roberts for being a white man.

Then there's religion. We tuned in to NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, and there was Mario Cuomo sounding for all the world like a 19th-century Know Nothing:

The question for Judge Roberts is, "Are you going to impose a religious test on the Constitution? Are you going to say that because the pope says this or the church says that, you will do it no matter what? You will overturn Roe against Wade."

Manuel Miranda lists other Bush-appointed judges, Catholic and Protestant, who've been subject to Democratic inquisitions for allegedly excessive piety. But being impious affords no protection. As we noted in March, Sen. Howell Heflin of Alabama explained in 1987 that he voted against Robert Bork's confirmation in part because he was "disturbed by his [Bork's] refusal to discuss his belief in God--or the lack thereof."

Gays, blacks, Latinos, whites, Catholics, Protestants, (suspected) atheists--come to think of it, liberals have a defense against the charge that they're prejudiced: They hate everyone equally.