For someone who is actively lobbying for a highly coveted Begala Award nomination (I wouldn't even dare dream of winning a Sontag), being in agreeance with Andrew Sullivan is probably not the wisest course of action, but on the issue of Sandy Koufax' right to a private life, I have to admit he's correct. I was astonished to see a number of supposedly progressive writers attack Koufax for his refusal to have further dealings with Rupert the Mad, on the grounds that it reinforced the insecurity that gay athletes possess; if a legend like Koufax won't come out of the closet, than the world of sports is truly homophobic.

Such a willfully blind opinion ignores the fact that in most of the articles covering this story, the issue hasn't been whether the New York Post falsely accused Koufax of being gay, but on Koufax' dignified assertion of his right to privacy (and also whether Koufax extorted his biographer to keep such information out of the book). The tone of these stories has not been of outrage that a baseball legend was defamed, but that a public figure was not able to keep some aspects of his life to himself. I have yet to see a column ridicule the notion that Koufax might be gay, nor a current or former member of the Dodgers quoted as laughing at the very idea. The more common reaction has been that even if the story is true, it shouldn't have published in the manner it was: as a blind, unsourced gossip item in a tabloid. Much like last year's story about Mike Piazza, the critics had already written the story about the unkind homophobia of SportsWorld, even if it didn't exactly reflect the reality of how the story was actually covered.

To be honest, for a variety of reasons I'm not opposed to outing public figures. If a sportswriter wants to take the time to interview Koufax' friends and associates and check into the rumors (and yes, there are rumors; one of the more disappointing aspects of Leavy's biography was the fact that those rumors were never commented on, if only to knock them down if they were false), then an article about a gay Hall-of-Famer would be perfectly appropriate. This was a blind item in a tabloid, referring to someone who was obviously Koufax as threatening to withhold his cooperation from a biography if his sexual preference was investigated by the author. Like the snarky reference in MWO last week to Miguel Estrada's sexual preference (which, btw, hypocritcally attacked the NY Post on this subject), in which the judicial nominee was listed with four other gay conservatives under a heading asking what each of these men had in common, this is a cowardly, and, perhaps more importantly, unreliable journalistic technique, one that must be condemned no matter who is its subject.