You make a good point. But the issue here is that, the leaders should be leading and not just talking about what leaders should do.

They always seem to get lost in their own noise.

Voices like Bernie, AOC, et al. will often start taking real action and garner positive national attention, but it regularly falls apart because the party as a whole seems uninterested in falling into line.

Nobody is supporting their good ideas because they keep waiting to get together on their perfect ideas, but spoiler that basically never happens. (They can be barely effective if they control the presidency and Congress, with Congress aligning to the president's agenda, but without that perfect environment they are effectively ineffective.)

I get it, it's still jarring though. I get that an LGBTQI+ mag would want to promote his sexuality to prove visibility of senior civil servants or G-men or whatever the US calls them, but it just feels like a qualifier that shouldn't be necessary.

Happy to learn otherwise though, I'm open to opinions.

What if the kid specifically tells you because they think it's confidential and the thing they are seeking is counseling? Reporting wasn't made mandatory for social workers and counselors because they were thinking about the desires of the rapist, it's because they wanted kids to have someone they could trust.

Priests I'm not so sure, as the perpetrator is likely a member of their club.

Don't think he got off easy, though. Managing his sex life in the 80s and avoiding STDs was his personal Vietnam, after all....

I mean I think trying to say that him saying that is shitty is kinda disingenuous. The guy was born in 1982, grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and probably realized he was gay during the 90s, a time that we, the LGBT community, were still reeling from and dealing with the AIDS crisis. I have no doubt a ton of queer kids back then thought the same as him because they just wanted to be normal and not thought of as monsters.

Plus his parents worked at Notre Dame, a Catholic university. So he was probably around a whole lot of not very accepting Catholics during his childhood.

What the point of that story was at the time was that he had to accept who he was, and that it was okay to be gay. That's a thing a lot of queer people have to go through.

Exactly. He doesn't "believe" anything per se. He's a cypher. Believes are fungible; having a belief is a transaction for him.

It's the fundamental difference between authentic politicians who have a belief and then seek the power to make that belief a reality, versus wanting power and then adopting whatever beliefs it takes to get you there.

Yeah, gay men from more prosperous backgrounds have some fucked up coping skills, they get worse as they rise in the world.

It’s more about class sickness than anything about being gay. Being a sexual minority fucks you up in any scenario, it’s just how the fucked upedness plays out at that level.

As a good old fashioned working class male homo who can pass as prosperous due to education and natural perspicuity, I have broad experience seeing how class fucks up gay men specifically.

My brother and his husband, both openly gay, stated to me just the other day that in their youth they prayed they were not gay and even shamed themselves for having homoerotic thoughts. What Pete is saying here probably reflects the way a large part of the LGBTQ+ community has felt as they came to grips with the way they feel and identify in contrast to societal expectations.

I don’t see how this somehow makes the guy a bad politician. If anything it shows he is human and normal.

I didn't realize that HN is career had ended.

Seriously though, if he is up to chrping about Epstein, why not chirp about programs that help people, about restoring democratic institutions so that they help people again. As a former mayor and Transport minister, can he not talk about infra that helps people and describe escape making moralism the basis of his platform.