Kagan: Not Gay, but Maybe Too Smart

Forget all the "baseless chatter" about Elena Kagan, writes Ruth Marcus. "She's not gay, OK?" Marcus believes Kagan's law school roommate, who also happens to be a friend. In fact, she wishes Kagan were gay, because it would be easy to write a column about how a homosexual judge would add perspective to the court. Instead, she has to wrestle with a question that seems "unnecessarily intrusive" but doesn't seem to be going away, either: "So if she's not gay, then why isn't she married?"

Which gets into all kinds of complicated "gender-based undertones," writes Marcus in the Washington Post. "The brutal fact is that if a never-married man in his 40s or 50s decides, well, better late than never, he's got options—some of them in their 20s or 30s. A never-married woman tends not to have the same array of choices." And don't forget that Kagan is wickedly smart. "As it happens, I was at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, and I don't think the men there were put off by smart women. But put off by women smarter than them? Very possibly, even if not consciously."
(More Elena Kagan stories.)