Who is Elena Kagan?

In a column from last week, Washington Post writer Ruth Marcus put in her 2 cents worth concerning the burning question, "Who is Elena Kagan?".

Immediately, Marcus attempts to assure her readers that Kagan is not gay. That issue preoccupied the minds of the Progressives last week. While Conservatives lamented the fact that Kagan has not left a paper trail that would give clues as to the sort of Supreme Court Justice she would be, the Left spent a good deal of time looking into Kagan's sexuality.

Marcus would have us believe that she is uncomfortable discussing the reasons why Kagan has never married......then proceeds to discuss that very issue. Marcus tells us that Kagan, rather than being a lesbian, is a smart woman with fewer choices. In Marcus' view, while men may not be turned off by intelligent women, men are turned off by women who are smarter than they are. Got it?

Marcus writes, "The smarter and more successful the woman, the more complicated the dating dynamic: how to leaven that intellect and competence to make the package a bit less threatening."

Obviously, men are pigs. We are horrible creatures because we would never marry a woman smarter than we are ........ let's not mention the fact that a woman may not want to marry a man who isn't quite as smart as she. It's a one-way street, I suppose.

Marcus also writes of the "brutal fact" that an unmarried man in his fifties can have a change of heart and marry a women in her 20's or 30's , but a woman in her fifties doesn't have the same choice. There is a great deal of truth in that. I know several men who are married to women 15, 20 or even 25 years younger. Heck, I'm one of those guys myself. You're unlikely to see many fifty-something year old women with thirty-something year old husbands.

Like many "inequalities" between men and women, this one has a biological component. A healthy man in his fifties can still father children; a woman the same age cannot get pregnant. Even with men who claim to have no desire to have children, this biological component has to have some affect, if only subconsciously.

Of course, there are other, more obvious reasons why Elena Kagan has never married, but I won't go there. At least not in this post.