This just came across in a Google Alert, and I thought it had some very good points:
We have to hand it to Aiken, though. The recent birth of his son, he told People, was the impetus for coming out of the closet.
"I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things," he told the mag. "I wasn't raised that way, and I'm not going to raise a child to do that."
With National Coming Out Day celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, it's a timely point. Coming out has more to do with honesty, self-acceptance and putting faith in loved ones than it does with anything else. It is not, as some like to assume, about declaring an ill-conceived or malicious rejection of society's moral code.
Just as each person is different, so too is their process in finding a way to live an open, self-actualized life. Some of us get magazine covers out of it. Most of us don't.
And while we don't really care (and, honestly, don't want to know) who Clay Aiken sleeps with, an important lesson got lost in the hoopla of his exit from the closet.
Instilling offspring with a sense of values and principles isn't a practice exclusively limited to the straight set. Gay people can put their children's development before themselves, too.
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