A Republican hero, but was Abe Lincoln gay?

It is news guaranteed to make many Republicans squirm. Was Abraham Lincoln, founder of the party now seeking a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in America, actually gay himself?

A new book, published next month, certainly thinks so. The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C.A. Tripp produces evidence that one of America's greatest Presidents had a long-term relationship with a youthful friend, Joshua Speed, and shared his bed with David Derickson, captain of his bodyguards.

Tripp, a former researcher for sex scientist Alfred Kinsey and an influential gay writer, includes asides by many of Lincoln's close friends. 'He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me,' his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, once told a friend.

It also includes a diary excerpt by one upper-class Washington woman who wrote of Derickson: 'There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!'

Scholars have long debated Lincoln's sexuality, and as early as the 1920s were making veiled references to his relationship with Speed. However, critics say that in the pioneer days men sleeping together in rough circumstances was not uncommon.

Now Tripp has discovered letters between Lincoln and Speed which supposedly betray a deep intimacy.

But Tripp's book really breaks new ground in its exhaustive portrayal of many of Lincoln's possible gay lovers, including one man who said Lincoln's thighs 'were as perfect as a human being could be'.

'Make no mistake - Abe Lincoln was gay,' said Professor Scott Thompson, from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

But David Donald, a Harvard professor and respected Lincoln biographer, has disputed Tripp's findings in his own book, We Are Lincoln Men, published last year, and says there is no definitive proof of Lincoln having affairs with any men.

Do we have the right to invade China because of their one child law and forced abortions and sterilizations? Do we have the right to invade Somalia because of female genital mutilation?

Yes, though the right to do so is related to the magnitude of the human rights violation. Or to toss the question back at you, do you think that we or any other nation would have had the moral right to invade Germany to stop the mass murder of "undesirables"? By what right does a government systematically murder innocents? Or to put it differently, by what right does a government become "sovereign"?

Obviously, both practices are morally abhorrent, but you are really advocating a slippery slope if you maintain that just because a wrong is happening, that you the have a right or obligation to invade to make it right.

There is a huge difference between having the right to do something, and having an obligation to do it. I have the right to stop someone from raping a woman in an alley, but I don't have an obligation to try to prevent it by force under all circumstances.

I have no legitimate authority over how my neighbor raises his kid. If he was being verbally abusive. I might not like it, but I don't have a right to go over there and punch him in the mouth.

What if he was torturing and murdering his kids? We don't have the troops to right all the wrongs in the world.

That goes to whether we should right the wrongs -- not whether we have the moral right to do so.

About the Civil War, my sympathy for the idea of secession by a state pretty much gets tossed out by the taint of slavery. I think its too hard a question to unravel completely because different people and groups had different motivations for the war. I look at the end result -- the ending of slavery -- and conclude it was the right and proper thing to do. As for the cost...yes, it was pretty horrendous. I look at it as the penance, the "reparations", if you will, for our nation's support of slavery for its first 80 years. I'm a big believer in liberty, and the thought of slavery absolutely turns my stomach.

If secession were to be permitted at any level, it would have to be possible only via a supermajority, perhaps with referendums, to lessen the possibility of a one-time election victory pulling people out of their country. And again, I can't quite grasp the logic for where you draw the line at secession. If a state, why not a county? If a county, why not a city? If a city, why not a street? And if a street, why not an individual house? And I still think you're overlooking how secession effective deprives the minority of its rights.

Thanks for being civil and rational, though. These secession debates can get ugly.

Same here. Like I said, I think the arguments in favor of a state's right to secede as of 1860 are decent. I mean, if a state had the right to decide whether or not to join the union in the first place, why shouldn't it have the right to reverse that decision later? I think there are valid arguments the other way as well -- the protection of the national citizenship rights of the minority, in particular -- but at least its possible to have a reasonable debate.

My mother lives in Pennsylvania and I live in Ohio. Just because Bush won Ohio by 100,000 votes and lost Pennsylvania by 100,00 votes you think we should be in different countries.

PA and OH may not be different countries (in fact they are both border states between two divergent regions) but Massachusetts and Texas certainly are. IMVHO I would not shed a tear to see New England break off from the rest of the country. They could easily draw the line at the New York border with Vermont and Connecticut and send them on their merry socialist homosexual way without any significant net loss to the rest of us. PA and OH both swung by a percentage point or two but New England did not. There was only one red county in Connecticut, one red county in Vermont, and IIRC 2 in Maine. Rhode Island and Massachusetts were solid blue in every single county. It wasn't even close and for that I say good riddance to them all.

When it comes down to preserving the Union, I say p!ss away.

So did Hitler, Stalin, and every other conquering tyrant of history. Alexis de Tocqueville warned us of the danger to America presented by people like Lincoln who purport to be saving a mythical concept of "the union" above all else. It is unfortunate that we did not heed his warning and big government today is our punishment.

"If one of the federated states acquires a preponderance sufficiently great to enable it to take exclusive possession of the central authority, it will consider the other states as subject provinces and will cause its own supremacy to be respected under the borrowed name of the sovereignty of the Union. Great things may then be done in the name of the Federal government, but in reality that government will have ceased to exist." - Democracy in America

In Iowa, you had a tiny margin that likely was the product of fraud. You'd really be "ecstatic" to see a minority of voters deprive every other Iowan of his/her U.S. citizenship?

Not at all, but I would be more than happy to see New England, which was dyed in the wool Kerry country by an overwhelming majority, be shown the door. You are formulating an argument against the secession of the blue states by pointing to the conditions of marginal cases on the border between the two regions. In reality it is their anchoring territory that produces the greatest problem. That means New England.

The nation can survive with an Iowa or a Pennsylvania or even a New York because all have conservative regions within their borders. Sometimes those regions are a majority. Other times they are a minority. But they do exist. Not so with Massachusetts though, where every single county in the state went for Kerry and every single congressional district elected a Democrat from the left end of the left wing of that party.

Playing the Hitler card = admitting you lost the argument.

Making logically inane statements such as the above in response to a sound historical reference to the fact that Hitler shared in and praised Lincoln's conception of "the union" = admitting that you don't even have a coherent argument to make in the first place.

"[In America] it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states." - Hitler, Mein Kampf

Sounds a lot like Lincoln, doesn't it?

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