Is National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice a lesbian? Thanks to the media coverage of a recent comic strip, that is the question that is suddenly on everyone's lips.

The controversy started last week when The Washington Post decided not to run a strip of the Boondocks comic strip that suggested Rice's single status may be contributing to the continuation of the War on Terrorism--or to quote from it directly, "maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it." While no other newspaper pulled the strip that day, the Post defended its decision by invoking a newspaper policy not to comment on the personal life of political figures; furthermore, they stated, "We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder's assertion that Condoleezza Rice had no personal relationship was true or not."

It's debatable whether the comic strip is even suggesting Rice is gay; although that's one possible interpretation, it's not the most obvious one.

What isn't debatable, however, is that it's a sexist comment, which even the comic strip acknowledges--in the next day's strip, one of the characters reacts sarcastically to the first boy's suggestion to find Rice a boyfriend with the comment "What I really like about this idea is that it isn't the least bit sexist or chauvinistic."

This raises an interesting question, actually: is it okay to make sexist comments if, at the same time, you're pointing out that they're sexist? This answer, too, is debatable, but given that the character's comment about this idea being "sexist and chauvinistic" doesn't appear until the next day's strip, it's kind of a moot point to anyone who only read that day's paper.

The Post's decision received some mild coverage following the decision, but didn't really become front-page news until journalist Richard Blow, a former editor of George Magazine, suggested in his column a few days later that the Post pulled the strip in part because they feared Rice would be offended at the possible interpretation of the comment to mean she's gay. "Particularly," Blow added "since there's already scuttlebutt to this effect in Washington, primarily, so far as I can tell, because Rice is single and comes across as a little frosty."

On the one hand, Blow makes fun of the fact that the gossip in Washington about Rice's sexual orientation is mostly fueled by the fact that she is an assertive single woman, and he also criticizes the idea that "any suggestion that someone is gay is so offensive that it has to be yanked from the paper."

On the other hand, when Rice's sexual orientation was only water-cooler gossip in the Beltway and on internet message boards, mainstream news outlets wouldn't touch the subject. Now that Blow has actually put that gossip into print, he's given it a legitimacy it didn't have before--and suddenly news outlets around the country feel just fine passing it along in the guise of "objective reporting" on The Comic Strip Controversy. Not all news outlets mentioned the the gay angle--many just said the Post pulled the strip because it commented on Rice's personal life--but enough news outlets did that many average Americans who were previously unaware of the gossip have now heard about it.

There's a scene in the political drama The Contender (2000) in which Gary Oldman's character publicly decries the vicious gossip spread on the internet about Joan Allen's character, while repeatedly spelling out the website address to ensure the public would have instant access to the gossip. The Post's decision and the media's coverage of it seem suspiciously similar, as if they are slyly discrediting Rice while claiming to protect her.

Like the conflict in The Contender, The Media vs. Condoleezza Rice in this instance is really about sexism, not politics, with a little homophobia and racism thrown in. As the first female and first African-American National Security Advisor, Rice is an attractive target for people uncomfortable with women and African-Americans in positions of power.

Of course, being called a lesbian shouldn't be any big deal, but the reality is that for women (particularly single women) in public positions of power, these kinds of rumors can be very damaging. Rumors of lesbianism have dogged women like Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, and Hillary Clinton (to name a few of the most recent women in power) for years, regardless of their veracity.

But whether Rice or any of the political figures gossiped about actually are lesbians is not the point. It's the use of lesbianism as a slur that is so disturbing, since it's based not only on the assumption that a strong, confidant woman must not be a "real" (read: heterosexual) woman, but that only women in heterosexual relationships are "real" women. By implication, lesbians and unmarried straight women are always somehow "less than."

Blow might have thought he was doing the public a service by calling the Post on their decision, but he didn't do Rice or women in general any favors by giving Rice's detractors in the media a platform to spread gossip about her to a national audience and, at the same time, reinforce the idea that lesbianism is a shocking secret--all without any of them getting their hands dirty, since they are just repeating what others have said.

If this is what passes as unbiased news coverage these days, it's no wonder there are still so few women in power.