While LGBT activists continue to praise James McGreevey, New Jersey's embattled Democratic governor, despite the mounting evidence of political corruption and charges of sexual harassment, another newly out Garden State official explains why he's ashamed of the state's highest official "gay American." Reports the New Jersey Journal:
Hudson County Freeholder Ray Velazquez is so offended by the governor's handling of his legal troubles and so worried that the gay community will be hurt by the scandal that he is publicly acknowledging that he, too, is a gay elected official. Most troubling, he said, is the allegation that Gov. James E. McGreevey put his lover on the public payroll.
"It's not enough to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm a gay man,' to cover up those things," Velazquez said this week at his Downtown law office. "It sends the wrong message, and as a gay man who has worked his entire life and who feels an obligation to the gay community, I think it's best that he resign his office immediately. Being gay does not give you the right to abuse your public office.
And,
writing in the Washington Post, novelist Francine Prose
observes:
I keep finding myself more concerned about the $110,000 annual salary that McGreevey paid his lover for a job as a homeland security adviser -- a position for which the aspiring Israeli poet apparently had few qualifications -- than I am about the governor's sexuality, or the fate of his marriage.
And I am left wondering whether the governor may have been trying to use the American obsession with sex and celebrity gossip to his own advantage, hoping perhaps that the sympathy he would gain by declaring his lifelong identity crisis might outweigh the censure over the financial irregularities that were already beginning to blight his record.
No kidding. On the other hand, a letter published in our mailbag
takes on
McGreevey's critics.
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