Jay Timmons is the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and has been heavily involved in fighting for a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. He is also, apparently, gay himself - something that has been revealed through the efforts of gay activists trying to "out" gay conservatives working to harm other gays in society.

The Washington Blade reports:

The NRSC, headed by Timmons, has the single responsibility to ensure the election of Republican candidates to the Senate and has declared its intention to seize upon the issue of same-sex marriage to motivate conservative voters to unseat congressional Democrats. Minutes after the results were tallied on the amendment’s roll call vote last week, Republican Senate candidates in the South and West sent out angry statements through the NRSC proclaiming the end of marriage should Democrats take control of Congress.

Local gay activist Michael Rogers, who has led the effort to out gays working for conservative politicians, has compared Timmons to the late Roy Cohn, the high-profile gay attorney who started his career as an aide to former anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy. “What this community is saying is that we will no longer tolerate the Roy Cohns of the world,” Rogers said. “We’re talking about gay men working for homophobes in the day, raising money for them and advocating their policies, and then going to the bars at night. Jay Timmons is a Roy Cohn.”

What started as a personal battle against the Federal Marriage Amendment on Capitol Hill has now developed into an indefinite crusade to “expose more homophobes inside the gay community,” Rogers said this week. Rogers and Aravosis have been using their Web sites to out closeted members of Congress who support the FMA and their gay staff members. ... “If you are like me, you’re probably wondering: How, in America, in 2004, can an openly gay man live with himself while he works to elect those that would ensure second-class citizenship upon his own community?” Rogers wrote.

Some argue that such “outings” are inappropriate because a person’s sexuality should remain private. This is not an unreasonable argument — it would, for example, be a problem if people starting “outing” each other on every possible issue in order to punish them for taking some unpopular position. In this context, however, I would have to disagree.

If an important member of PETA, actively involved in popular efforts to ban the sale of meat, was known to grab a Big Mac a couple of times a week, would it be wrong to publicize that fact? I don't think so. By making a political issue out of what others eat, they are no longer entitled to the same privacy about what they eat. By politicizing the issue, their real beliefs about it become a matter of public interest.

The same, I believe, is true here as well. By making sexuality a political football, a person's real beliefs about sexuality become a matter of public interest. If a person is spending a lot of time and money to ban X, I deserve to know what they really think about X. If it looks like they will use their power and money to keep getting X, even as I am denied it, then their use of X is no longer a privacy question.

This means, I think, that if “outing” is going to be at all ethical, it should only occur in narrow circumstances where a person is “outed” has having a private position that is contrary to the public and political persona. This would include gay people fighting against civil rights for gays or a vegan activist who eats Big Macs.

Read More:

• Gay Rights, Gay Marriage
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality
• Catholicism & Homosexuality