Andrew Sullivan calls my old friend Fred Barnes’s admiring book about President Bush “fellatial.” Imagine if someone had used such a word about an Andrew Sullivan blog item about, say, John McCain. Andrew would have been OUTRAGED! He would have demanded an APOLOGY! Andrew, you see, is gay. So any comparison of his rhetoric to homosexual conduct would be UNACCEPTABLE. But Andrew, being gay, is free to use slighting sexual references to homosexual conduct when discussing the rhetoric and ideas of others. Why? Because, in Andrew’s eyes, he is beyond reproach solely because he shares a bed with other men. And Fred Barnes? Married to a…(I know it’s unimaginable) woman. How contemptible of Fred. Doesn’t he know marriage is only for gay people? UPDATE: Yes, the act Andrew S. analogizes to Fred Barnes’s treatment of President Bush is not exclusively one performed by homosexuals. But since Sullivan uses the word for a male writer’s analysis of another male, his use of the word “fellatial” therefore has an unmistakably gay tinge.