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Does it matter that Nate Silver--this Presidential election's real superstar--is gay?
David Badash at The New Civil Rights Movement makes a strong argument for why it may.
Check it out his piece on the statitician who accurately predicted how ALL FIFTY states would vote in this year's Presidential election (and who's making life sexier for nerds everywhere).
More after the jump!
Badash writes:
"It doesn’t matter that Nate Silver is gay. It matters that people who don’t like or respect gay people — or who even hate gay people — people who think we’re immoral and a danger to society, know that Nate Silver is gay.
And that should help them start to change their perception.
It doesn’t matter that Nate Silver is gay. But it matters people know because there are lawmakers who want to ban same-sex marriage. And religious leaders and pundits who want to criminalize our relationships. And presidential candidates who want to take away our right to visit our loved ones in the hospital. And schoolyard bullies who cut gay boys’ hair — who grow up to be presidential candidates who want to take away our right to visit our loved ones in the hospital.
America is changing, because people know we’re not going away.
It doesn’t matter that Nate Silver is gay. It matters that America knows he is."
We think Badash has a point. The issue isn't that Silver is gay (though we're thrilled to claim him as a member of the team), it's that the visibility of the LGBT community excelling in all career fields (and existing in all walks of life) can only be beneficial to us.
Also, as Badash notes, Silver's perceived sexuality, which wasn't widely known, was already used against him by others on the conservative circuit as a means of downplaying the accuracy of his statistical findings.
Dean Chambers of "Unskewed Polls" writes:
"Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be."
So others can use Silver's sexuality to denigrate him (and, ya know, math), but we can't use it to celebrate him?
Nah.
Nate Silver is openly gay. He's at the top of his game--and it's awesome.
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