I might be mistaken, but I don't think Ace is terribly sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan's plight. (Or, for that matter, that of Gren Gleenwald, whose hatred and vitriolic excesses I think make Sullivan look kind and reasonable.)

I should probably warn readers that Ace is pissed, so if you're easily upset, you might want to do your touchy-feely yoga exercises before clicking the links.

Whether Sullivan is engaged in the type of deliberate rumor-mongering about Fred Thompson that Ace complains of, I do not know. For his part, Sullivan denies it:

Wonkette inferred some gay rumor, and then the blogosphere ran with it. Please. All I meant was that Thompson, as a single man, had had a lot of dates with a lot of women, something that strikes me - and a lot of Republicans as well - as completely fine. I have never heard a single gay rumor about Thompson and never intended to be interpreted as spreading one.

This is such total, utter crap. Honestly, I wish I didn't have to write this post, but the country's obsession with sex does not stop simply because I stomp my feet and demand it.

I do think that to the extent Sullivan encourages any such rumor-mongering, he is engaged in a betrayal of his own principles, and while I don't agree with the characterizations Ace heaps on Sullivan, I think Ace has a good point here:

Let's flash back: Back to the days when Andrew Sullivan was, he claimed, all about sexual privacy. He shrieked about it, in fact. Exposing someone's private sexual behavior was the worst form of Sexual McCarthyism. As one of his post-titles had it.

I hope Andrew Sullivan's views on sexual McCarthyism haven't changed.

What worries me is that he seems to be promoting a mindset that I find anathema, but which I've warned is becoming an

agreement along the following lines:

RESOLVED: Gays do not belong in the Republican Party.

I think that's identity politics, and it is the antithesis of political freedom.

It's also the antithesis of sexual freedom, but I guess that's long been a casualty of America's war on sex.

I hope Fred Thompson doesn't become a casualty of the war on sex, and I don't mean that as gay rumor-mongering. FWIW, I don't think Fred Thompson is gay in the least. I would not care, but the idea strikes me as absurd. However, this good man (who I think has the makings of a great president) is already under attack for the "trophy wife" nonsense, and the campaign hasn't even begun in earnest.

Does it all really have to be about genitalia?

I guess so.

Welcome to the world of premature elections.

(There's no need to worry about issues, for we all have genitals....)

UPDATE: The new (apparently moved) link to Andrew Sullivan's "witch hunt is a witch hunt" post is here.

UPDATE (07/13/07): Writing at Pajamas Media, Rick Moran has a must-read post on the latest battle in the Sex War:

I could go on and on listing issues that have some bearing on the nation's health and well being or are just huge stories of national and international import.

And yet, David Vitter gets caught with his pants unzipped and a media frenzy erupts.

There's so much hypocrisy all around that it's unbelievable, and I agree with Rick.

The ultimate question of who wins the Sex War is probably related to who wins the related Hypocrisy War. Right now, there's a relentless push to show that the Republicans are more hypocritical than the Democrats, but I think what's being forgotten is that merely being a Republican does not make one a sanctimonious moral scold. If the noisier Republicans learned how to tap into their laissez faire roots (all they have to do is shut up a little louder) and let the Democrats go too far with the sexual scolding, the ordinary people (especially those who only want to be left alone) might realize that where it comes to upholding sexual morality, no one has a monopoly.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has a really good post titled "Liberalism, Libertarianism and Gay Rights":

I argued specifically against the liberal recipes for gay equality: against hate crime laws and even against employment discrimination laws. I argued that a conservative position on gay rights would leave private discrimination and prejudice alone and change only the government's stance so that all citizens are treated equally by the state, even if they are subject to discrimination by private entities. Virtually Normal did contribute, I think, to a deeper understand that marriage rights and military service were central to the gay rights movement. In that, it helped revolutionize the gay rights movement - against the wishes of many of its leftist leaders. But I had no luck trying to shift the liberal nannying and tolerance-mongering of the gay establishment.

Still, we're not all liberals. For the record. But it's a quixotic position, I will sadly concede. Freedom is not as popular as it once was. And liberals have helped whittle it away.